Indo-Israeli Workshop on Computer Vision : Was at good old IIIT-H during the first week of February for this workshop. Definitely a good one as the talks were carefully culled. I was representing Sarnoff Corporation for the first time at a conference.The talks were all great and the big point I took note of was the abscence of talks on Geometric Vision which is indicative of the new wave : appearance and image based methods. Meeting great researchers is always quite exciting and the informal nature of the workshop made the experience even better (more than 7 hours of the two-day conference were dedicated to informal interaction). Among the talks, my picks (obviously I wont go in to the detials, check the workshop and the homepages of speakers for details) : Jitendra Malik gave an excellent review of what was and what is and insights in to future of object recognition. He never needed equations to give an overview of his works like shape context matching and deformable templates. Shree Nayar and Manik Verma both presented work with sound theoretical basis and excellent results. I am now a big fan of both 
. Lihi Zelnik and Lior Wolf both presented work with simple theory (more like common-sense, in fact) which had really really cool results. Overall, it was great attending the workshop and definitely CVIT is moving towards great heights. Hoping to see many more such workshops for the benefit of researchers in India.
We are Sorry!! : Australia apologized for the years of ill-treatment of aborigines yesterday. While it takes courage to ask for forgivenness and as appreciable as the gesture is, I wonder if saying sorry is the best way to reconciliation. Firstly, after reading many australian blogs and blog-comments following the Sydney cricket match, I seriously doubt if this sorry symbolizes a change at the heart. Second, while modern Australia eventually recognized and honored its aboriginal heros such as Cathy Freeman, too many of them must have been lost during the bad days. It must be most humiliating to be treated as a second rate citizen in one’s home land (God Bless India ). For a sample see this. If only a sorry could set all the wrongs right…sigh!! However, evolving and getting better is the hallmark of our species… hope that this will mark the beginning of a new era for them (Good Luck Land of Oz).
