ICCV 2019

Takeaways (TL;DR)

• Orals are generally not that useful compared to the posters.
• Use the posters as a way to identify important and interesting papers to read later.
• Workshop keynote talks are good, but it’s important to identify which speakers are presenting to go to the best ones.
• Social activities are super important to have fun and meet new people to do things with. Most people are down to do things.
• Can’t really go back to S. Korea due to the lack of Indian food :’(.
• Why aren’t more cities and countries building amazing metro systems and concrete cities the way Seoul is built?
  • Don’t keep the airport a bajillion miles away.
  • ++ for cabs and all stores except street vendors accepting credit cards.
• Omg no tipping is the absolute best.

I had a chance to go to Seoul for ICCV 2019, which is the premier computer vision research conference in the world. This was a great opportunity since the topics covered in the talks included segmentation and a huge variety of other computer vision topics relevant to my work.

Travel

Just booking the tickets for the conference was a bit problematic, since I had to make sure to come to India to get my visa. I was planning on coming back anyway, but the conference was a great excuse to go halfway and visit a new country that I would be unlikely to visit explicitly. I wasn’t planning to visit South Korea simply since I’m vegetarian, and the Korean cuisine is not suited to us. I booked business class to Seoul and back on United, whilst combining my trip to India on Air India through Delhi, which was the cheapest I could find.

At SFO airport, I was able to relax in the lounge and enjoy the breakfast. I failed to realize that they made breakfast as meals and only partook in the buffet breakfast :’(. During this time, I was trying to finish some work, before heading over to the gate for boarding. I had downloaded the Kevin O’Hearne Iron Druid Chronicles series for my journey to Seoul and was just about starting to read it after getting comfortable in my seat.

However, my kindle slipped through the cracks between the seat cushion and edge. Since my seat was electronically adjustable, it was a fire hazard for a battery-based device to be near the movable components. Whilst I borrowed my head in shame, the crew and even the captain were on the floor looking with flashlights for the kindle. Eventually, I did manage to find where it was and somehow pulled it out, before the mechanics got on board. First time I’ve been the cause of a flight delay, and one of the most unexpected instances of a flight being delayed. Luckily, the crew was pretty nice about my ordeals, and funnily enough, after the flight took off, the passenger in front of me had the same issue. Due to this, I blame the problem entirely on the seat design structure instead of on myself.

On the flight, I watched Spiderman: Far from home and Deadpool 2 interspersed with reading the Iron Druid Chronicles. I managed to finish 2 books on the flight, and plan to finish the rest of the series. The food was pretty good on the flight, where I got a ravioli, some wine, a lot of bread, and grilled cheese with tomato soup.

After landing in Seoul, I struggled to figure out how to get to the hotel. Google Maps seemed to be doing its own weird thing where it wasn’t allowing me to interact with the map properly, and uber only had international taxi and uber black. I eventually came to the right place to take the taxi and started the journey into Seoul. It just so happened that there was a protest that day that caused an immense amount of traffic in the city, which is why it took me 3 hours from the airport to the hotel. Admittedly, the taxi driver was pretty slow, but even then it was a shocking amount of delay. I also learned that the district that I was staying in Gangnam, which was the fashionable district that the world-famous song Gangnam Style is based on.

My hotel, Grand Intercontinental Parnas, was able to upgrade my room and my god I could fit an extra car into the room. I don’t understand how they thought a single person needed that much room for themselves. It was one of the reasons that my room was used as a hub for my eventual friends. After checking into the hotel and freshening up a bit, I headed out to get dinner food at an Indian restaurant, which has the highest probability of vegetarian food compared to other cuisines. After that, I briefly stepped into the COEX mall, which is the biggest underground mall in Asia. I roamed around some of the stores and checked out Starfield Library, before coming back to my room and sleeping for the night.

Day 1 of the Conference (October 27th, 2019, Sunday)

Even though I slept the previous day at 10 pm, jetlag hit me pretty hard and I woke up at 2 am and literally couldn’t fall asleep. The combination of Iron Druid Chronicles and YouTube kept me awake until it was time to go to the conference. Weirdly, even though the hotel was a 5-star hotel, breakfast wasn’t included in my rooms and I found this out after the meal. The breakfast was pretty expensive given the spread that they had (52,000 Korean wan), for a sparse set of fruit, eggs, bread, and some pastry items.

I had no idea where the conference was happening inside COEX, but after following the crowd and meeting up with the Face Tracking folks, we were able to get into the registration line. And wow was it a line! The line stretched quite far, and the organizers ended up allowing everyone into the workshops for the day so that they didn’t miss any of the speakers. \

That first day I attended the gaze estimation workshop, that had some good speakers but was somewhat of a rehashing of things I already knew. After lunch, I met up with Matthew and went to the interpretability tutorials by Andrea Valdadi.

Main Bullet Points to look up:

• Focal Loss
• Gambling Nets
• Attention is all you need
• Feature Pyramid

After the conference, Peter, Matt, and I got food with one of their team members in this Japanese restaurant before we were roaming around the COEX conference.

Day 2 (October 28th, Monday)

I woke up at 5 am, so a stark 3-hour improvement over the awful 2 am waking ups. The day had more interesting talks with

• Rand Augment
• Efficient Net
• Auto Augment
• Uber Net

Around 12, I headed off to do some sightseeing with Qiang, Alex, and Shu. We struggled with getting the taxi driver to understand where we were going but eventually managed to hit up the right location near Gyeongbokgung Palace. The restaurant they went to was a crab specialty restaurant, so I went and found some Italian restaurant close by that had vegetarian food. After a cheesy mushroom risotto, I took the plunge and got some boba, that was really chocolate milk, and roamed around while they were finishing up their meal.

As the palace was pretty close by, I went to first see the pagoda and then got a chance to see the change of guard ceremony. I did find it pretty funny how all the guards were wearing fake facial hair and appearing to be like the Mongols of old but have evolved now to not have any facial hair. After the other folks finished up their meal, we all continued to go around the palace area. I was pretty unimpressed by the overall architecture of the area and learned that the Korean king’s had to keep their structures small to appease the Chinese Emperors. I want to go and read more on East Asian history to understand what led to the dynamics and society that is present in the countries there.

After the palace, we headed over to the Jogyesa Buddhist temple. Post looking around at the beautiful temple, they got some food, and we all headed home. I ended up getting the Hummus Kitchen, because I was getting a bit sick of all the Italian food, which ended up becoming a trend that week.

Day 3 (October 29th, Tuesday)

The day the main conference started. The previous two days were mainly just workshops and tutorials, but I found it useful compared to the main conference events. The conference started with the best paper awards and some of the runner ups. The SinGAN paper particularly was super cool with the wide variety of applications and the ability to generalize to a huge amount of images by just training on a single one.

I generally found the Oral Sessions to be not so useful compared to the poster sessions. This was mainly because of how my interest waxed and waned between the oral sessions that would get me pretty distracted, before needing something truly compelling to focus again. Meanwhile, the posters were a lot easier where I could walk around and skip the ones that didn’t interest me.

The main instances of the papers were in: Self Driving Cars, GAN’s, Person Re-Identification, Pose Estimation, and 3D reconstruction.

After a full day of posters and orals, my weary body and mind were rearing to do something. I met up with Matt who introduced me to Josh who was planning to go out and do some touristy things later. I grabbed onto the opportunity and we all went to the Seoul Tower with Mandela, Laura, Josh, and I. That question was one of the best decisions I made because I hung out with that crew the entirety of the conference.

To get to the Seoul Tower, we took a taxi and then had a cable car up the mountain where we got to see amazing night time views of Seoul. We did pay to go up the tower, where there was this cool projection installation, but it wasn't worth it that much to go to the top of the tower. After some dope profile pictures, we walked down the mountain and headed into the Myeongdong shopping market. Sadly, the market was kind of closed, but we still had a good time going around. I got one of the Seoul hoodies, while the others got some street food.

Day 4 (October 29th, Wednesday)

For whatever reason, the conference had a half-day on Wednesday, probably to prepare for the banquet at night. I didn’t care for the banquet and actually much rather preferred to be doing things outside rather than go to the banquet. We were at the conference during the usual morning poster and oral sessions but then headed out to lunch with a slowly increasing group of people. It was originally Matt, Peter, and I, and then close to when we were done eating, Mandela and his friend arrived, closely followed by Laura. Post lunch, we headed to my rooms (the most conveniently located), and I was helping Mandela debug some distributed training code, before heading out.

The first place that we visited was the Lotte World Tower, a 123-floor massive skyscraper, that was by far the tallest building in Seoul. It's the 6th tallest building in the world and naturally had a phenomenal view from the top of the tower. There were a few floors at the top of the tower that we could visit, that eventually culminated with the observation deck. Some of the others bought some souvenirs, but we eventually all just had these shakes at the top of the tower. Josh bought a wasabi flavored shake, but then we saw that there was a Tiramisu flavored one, which eventually became the only thing that we ordered. One interesting thing about Korea was that in most of the menu's there was a 'best' label, which was used by the restaurant to recommend the favorite dishes from the restaurant.

Though Laura was attempting to drag us to Lotte World, a theme park, we eventually headed to the mall right next to the tower whilst planning our next steps. After they got some boba and some snacks, we headed to the Design Plaza. The plaza was just a modern building with some cool flooring in an interesting looking 3d oblong object that housed some design spaces. Since it's Korea, it also had to store some modern stores that sold 'fashionable' products.

There was a street market right outside the Design Plaza that we wanted to go to. The funniest thing about Korea was the sheer amount of women's shopping that existed. In that whole street market, I didn't find a single shop that sold any men's clothing haha. There were probably a hundred shops in that area and not a single one pandered to the male wallet. This seemed to be a common trend throughout the other stores and street markets that we visited during the stay.

After visiting the plaza, we headed back to the conference to see the banquet. While our cab brought us too late, apparently it was a pretty cool event with martial arts and dances that represented Korean culture. There was barely any food left at the event, but we did scrounge on whatever was available for dinner. After the banquet, I think we just relaxed and talked in our rooms, before Matt mentioned that some of his friends were at a place called White Bear.

Once we arrived at White Bear, the waiters told us the place was closed at 11 pm, though it was supposed to only close at midnight. But, the waiter ended up telling us that our friends were waiting for us upstairs, which confused us since we thought we were ahead of the others. We ended up going upstairs to 3 people I hadn’t seen before and they were also like these aren’t our friends. I then used Matt’s name and they realized we were 2 groups. Matt’s car eventually ended up arriving and we sat down together. One of them was based in Korea and knew their way around the drinks and ordered a series of Makgeolli. Makgeolli is a type of rice-based alcohol and in the bar, they served it in a variety of fashions. One was a disgusting yogurt-esque concentrate that was super strong. I think pretty much no one at the table was able to tolerate the drink, but since the other Matt liked it we all gave it to him to down. The bar ended up closing at midnight, and we then started walking around to find a place with actual food and drinks since some of us were still hungry.

Danny, the FAIR recruiter, was able to find a place pretty soon and we got stuck in. As a Korean, he was able to talk to the waiters who couldn’t speak English. We spoke about everything from RS recruiting and how you needed to be a god to get those positions at these companies, to the waterfall drinking game. It was a super fun night, and we ended up trying to go to the Octagon Club (Octacluuub!!).

Sadly, the 7th best club in the world (Octacluuub) was closed :’(. We ended up calling it a night at 3:30 am and headed back to the hotel.

Day 5 (October 31th, Thursday)

I was truly tired the next day as I still woke up at 8:30 am, which is not enough sleep. After more posters and orals with barely being able to pay attention due to the sleep deprivation, I was trying to get lunch.

I was trying to get tickets for some of the parties that the companies held, but completely failed to get either the Google or Facebook one. The facebook one was completely on me as I didn't register for the event on the workplace group, and the google one it was too late by the time I got the link. They did open some spots up, but at that exact time, I was visiting the Facebook Seoul office and completely missed my chance of getting to the event. Peter, Matt, and I had gone to the FB office to get Peter a loaner laptop since his screen had broke. They got food at a Korean barbecue place, whilst I got Taco Bell since there weren't any vegetarian food options in the KBB place.

After the full day of events, I eventually came back to my room after dinner with some of the squad, and while I was initially planning to try and get into the parties, I was way too tired to successfully pull it off. Later I learned that the google party wasn't that great, and though my friends went to Octaclub I definitely wouldn't have enjoyed it since there was a lot of smoking and techno music.

Day 6 (November 1st, Friday)

After a series of more orals and presentations (how many more lol??!), we ended up getting lunch at more Italian restaurants. I got food with Arjun, Laura, and Mandela, before we headed back to the conference. A lot of the folks needed to do some work in the evening, but we eventually were able to do something.

We went and got dinner at some vegetarian Michelin rated Korean restaurant, where I had a 5-course meal with fancy food. My theory about how these fancy restaurants put more emphasis on the way the food is presented compared to the way it tastes holds still, in addition to the affirmation that the Indian cuisine’s way of focusing on taste rather than presentation. Whilst the dishes looked incredible, the meal was sadly not even comparable to the Arrabbiata pasta that I had in COEX.

We eventually came back to relax at Matt's hotel in the Park Hyatt. He had a pretty sick view with the electronic blackout curtains and a great view of the COEX main intersection. After waiting for Mandela and Josh, who were having their meal at the same restaurant as us, we met up with Danny at Pocha Factory. We met some of his friends and colleagues there and proceeded to have a good amount of fun.

After a while, we headed to a Karaoke bar which turned out to be super fun. Everyone was singing their favorite old pop songs and I was close to losing my voice. I did eventually dip out since I had to attend the workshops the next day, but it was an amazing time.

Day 7 (November 2nd, Friday)

The AR/VR eye-tracking workshop was pretty good where I learned a lot of things relevant to my work. I’m looking forward to testing some of them out as soon as I get back to the office. The poster sessions particularly were really useful.

We attended the sessions the whole day, and then I met up with Mandela and Laura to try and do touristy things. We eventually headed out to the Unhyeongung district to see the palace and then wanted to see Changdeokgung Palace. The palace was sadly closed, but we looked at some tea shop since Mandela wanted boba. It was weird, but in that area, there wasn’t a single place that sold the actual boba/tapioca beads much to Mandela’s disappointment.

We came to Ikseon Hanok Village, which was a fashionable street food and eating area. It was a cool busy village that had a ton of food options and was a unique little hidden niche of Seoul. The area wasn’t really visible from the outside, but the location was incredible. I wish I could’ve eaten some of the street food there, but they were all non-vegetarian. We got in line for a dumpling place where I thought I’d be able to get some food, but sadly there weren’t any vegetarian options there. We then went to an Italian place and got a Margherita, so I could eat some food at last. We also stopped by a cute Korean dessert and tea cafe where we had some shaved ice in red bean and raspberry flavors, in addition to some traditional Korean desserts that looked uncannily similar to some Indian ones.

After the village, we headed to the Namdaemun Market. Namdaemum market was one of the most popular markets in Seoul with 15,000 reviews on google maps, even though Google Maps doesn’t work properly. Sadly, part of the market was closed for whatever reason, but we slowly headed to Myeongdung Market which was truly bustling. There were a crazy amount of people compared to the previous time we had gone where most of the shops were closed. The other difference was also that it was the weekend compared to the weekday. FILA is a hard brand to find and it was going for pretty cheap in Korea relative to the US. They also got some boba while I was just going around the different shops. Danny had recommended the group to go to BHC for some fried chicken which they picked up at the precise time after waiting for an hour. I wanted to check out the Adidas store, but they’d closed out. Mandela and I tried to pull a fast one by saying that my friend was waiting inside the store, but they called us out so quickly sadly.

The night was still pretty young, so we headed over to Itaewon. After being there, I can confidently state that it was the party place in Seoul. The sheer number of people in scary and honestly gory costumes due to Halloween and the sheer amount of bars showed how popping it was. We ended up at a rooftop bar called Lua / Luna that had a really good view of Itaewon. On the car ride to Itaewon, Josh and I wanted to try out the 24-hour spa’s and massages that are popular in Korea. We found a place close to where we were and tried going there, but it ended up closed. As we were going there, we bailed immediately as we found the red light district, which we most definitely didn’t want to go to. After our scare with the catcallers, we met up with the others and just walked the whole district. By this point, the weary souls in the group, including me of course, bailed and headed back to the hotel.

Our taxi driver was pretty weird and tried acting as if he didn’t understand where COEX was and was just an overall unhelpful troll. The only useful thing that he taught us was that Ko or Co meant nose in Korean, which he kept showing us by pointing to his nose. He definitely knew English and I think it was just an elaborate scam. He ‘accidentally’ canceled the ride fee so we couldn’t pay by card. It was pretty much 2 am by the time I was back in my room and slept.

Day 8 (November 3rd, Sunday)

I learned the others had been outside till 5 am, and I was really glad to have dipped before that. My main plan for the day was to do some shopping and visit the remaining places on the list: the Changdeokgung Palace and Ewha Women’s University. I had some poor breakfast where I was overcharged for some grapes and a yogurt drink.

I was going to try the subway/metro system today since I hadn't been on it before. It was honestly so confusing trying to figure out how to get on the system. Google Maps completely failed me, and I learned that it was only showing bus routes rather than everything. At the subway station, I just stopped some clear tourist and he told me he was going to the same place as me. I was super glad to just follow him and figure it out along the way. We did have to ask some locals to get some help for which trains to take, but we managed to muddle through it and get to the palace. Funnily, it happened to be the other palace that I'd already been to! Charles, the person who I was with, was trying to meet some of his friends at the palace for a tour, and luckily for me, it turned out that he was in the wrong palace. We took a bus to the other palace, which was only two stops away. As the tour was only at 2:30 pm, I wasn't super keen on waiting that long for it, so Charles and I decided to muddle our way through the palace area.

The Changdeokgung Palace area was the highlight of the touristy things that I did. It was a beautiful area with a full spectrum of colors and foliage. The buildings were a lot more diverse than the other buildings that we had been to. The palace area had secret gardens and a lot of separated areas with different purposes. Charles and I just talked about the state of the tech world and the work they are doing for synthetic data.

For lunch, we were initially trying to go to the Hanok Village, but it was shockingly empty compared to the previous night. It showed us how much of a night city Seoul is. Instead, I had found a vegetarian Korean restaurant that we were headed to. Along the way, we were able to see a traditional parade which was unique and unexpected. I also stopped by an Asian paint shop to get some brushes. I was finally able to get vegetarian bibimbap, Laura's favorite word during the trip, and was pretty happy with it.

As the last touristy place on the trip, Ewha University was pretty cool initially, but there wasn’t too much too see there as we didn’t know anyone. By this point, Charles had to catch his flight, so we headed back to the COEX area. While I wanted to do more things, I was desperately craving a nap before having the energy to do anything.

After a refreshing nap, I headed to Bongeunsa Temple right next to COEX. The Bongeunsa Temple is a Buddhist temple located in the heart of Gangnam-Gu surrounded by skyscrapers. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed time in a temple area, but I did feel spiritually calm. After the spirituality session, I promptly destroyed it with some great capitalistic and materialistic spending due to the great exchange rate between the US and Korean Wan. Most of the items weren’t even up marked so it was a great deal on my side. I ended up having dinner at the same Italian restaurant before packing and hitting the bed.

Travel To India (November 4th, Saturday)

I had some scares about flight delays the next day since the air quality in Delhi was at its all-time low at 999. For comparison, the fires in SF last year reached a maximum of 200 which was already pretty scary. Some of the flights were canceled and delayed yesterday, which only added to my stress. All this resulted in waking up at 5 am and checking the flights. I saw both my flights were delayed by an hour which was fine.

I mainly just read Brent Week's The Burning White on the way back home, particularly in Delhi where there was an additional 2.5-hour delay. The food on the flight was pretty good, and I didn't have to worry about sleeping as it was a day time flight. I was just glad to reach home after all that time.