2022 VizWiz Grand Challenge Workshop

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 three dataset challenges, where the tasks are to answer visual questions and ground answers on images taken by people who are blind, and recognize objects in few-shot learning scenarios. 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 7: challenge submissions announced
Friday, May 6 [9:00am 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
Monday, June 20: all-day workshop

Submissions

We invite two types of submissions:

Challenge Submissions

We invite submissions of results from algorithms for three tasks: the visual question answering challenge task, the answer grounding challenge and the few-shot object recognition challenge. 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 the visual question answering and answer grounding challenges will receive financial awards sponsored by Microsoft:

- - 1rst place: $10,000 Microsoft Azure credit
  - 2nd place: $5,000 Microsoft Azure credit

Extended Abstracts

We invite submissions of extended abstracts on topics related to image captioning, visual question answering, visual grounding 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 in a hybrid manner. More details coming soon.

Schedule:

• 9:00-9:05: opening remarks
• 9:05-9:20: announcement of challenge winners
• 9:20-10:05 challenge winner talks
• 10:05-10:15: poster spotlight talks
• 10:15-11:15: poster session
• 11:15-12:00: lunch break
• 12:00-12:45: panel of blind tech advocates
• 12:45-1:30: panel of industry representatives
• 1:30-2:15: panel of computer vision researchers
• 2:15-2:30: break
• 2:30-3:15: interdisciplinary panel
• 3:15-4:00: interdisciplinary panel
• 4:00-4:45: interdisciplinary panel
• 4:45-5:00 closing remarks