
Overview
Our goal for this workshop is to educate researchers about the technological needs of people with vision impairments while empowering researchers to improve algorithms to meet these needs. A key component of this event will be to track progress on two dataset challenges, where the tasks are to answer visual questions and caption images taken by people who are blind. Winners of these challenges will receive awards sponsored by Microsoft. The second key component of this event will be a discussion about current research and application issues, including by invited speakers from both academia and industry who will share about their experiences in building today’s state-of-the-art assistive technologies as well as designing next-generation tools.
Important Dates
- Monday, February 1: challenge submissions announced
- Friday, May 21 [5:59pm Central Standard Time]: challenge submissions due
- Friday, May 21 [5:59pm Central Standard Time]: extended abstracts due
- Friday, May 28 [5:59pm Central Standard Time]: notification to authors about decisions for extended abstracts
- mid-June (specific date TBD): all-day workshop
Submissions
We invite two types of submissions:
Challenge Submissions
We invite submissions of results from algorithms for both the image captioning challenge task and the visual question answering challenge task. We accept submissions for algorithms that are not published, currently under review, and already published. The teams with the top-performing submissions will be invited to give short talks during the workshop. The top two teams for each challenge will receive financial awards sponsored by Microsoft:
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- 1rst place: $10,000 Microsoft Azure credit
- 2nd place: $5,000 Microsoft Azure credit
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Extended Abstracts
We invite submissions of extended abstracts on topics related to image captioning, visual question answering, and assistive technologies for people with visual impairments. Papers must be at most two pages (with references) and follow the CVPR formatting guidelines using the provided author kit. Reviewing will be single-blind and accepted papers will be presented as posters. We will accept submissions on work that is not published, currently under review, and already published. There will be no proceedings. Please send your extended abstracts to workshop@vizwiz.org.
Please note that we will require all camera-ready content to be accessible via a screen reader. Given that making accessible PDFs and presentations may be a new process for some authors, we will host training sessions beforehand to both educate and assist all authors to succeed in making their content accessible. More details to come soon.
Program
Location:
Event is being held virtually.
Schedule:
- 9:00-9:10am: Opening remarks
- 9:10-9:30am: Invited talk
- 9:30-9:50am: Invited talk
- 9:50-10:10am: Invited talk
- 10:10-10:30am: Break
- 10:30-11:30am: Panel with blind technology advocates
- 11:30am-12:30pm: Lunch break
- 12:30-12:40pm: Overview of challenge, winner announcements, and analysis of results
- 12:40-1:00pm: Talks by top-2 teams for both dataset challenges
- 1:00-1:15pm: Poster spotlights
- 1:15-2:00pm: Poster session
- 2:00-2:30pm: Break
- 2:30-2:50pm: Invited talk
- 2:50-3:10pm: Invited talk
- 3:10-3:30pm: Invited talk
- 3:30-3:45pm: Break
- 3:45-4:45pm: Live panel with invited speakers
- 4:45-4:55pm: Open discussion
- 4:55-5:00pm: Closing remarks
Invited Speakers:
Yue-Ting Siu
San Francisco State University
Daniela Massiceti
Microsoft
Joshua Miele (tentatively)
Amazon
Organizers
Danna Gurari
University of Texas at Austin
Jeffrey Bigham
Carnegie Mellon University, Apple
Meredith Morris
Microsoft
Ed Cutrell
Microsoft
Abigale Stangl
University of Washington
Yinan Zhao
University of Texas at Austin
Samreen Anjum
University of Texas at Austin
Contact Us
For questions, comments, or feedback, please send them to Danna Gurari at danna.gurari@ischool.utexas.edu.