We are pleased to announce the 2nd Workshop on User-Centred Computer Vision (UCCV 2014), to be held as part of the Asian Conference on Computer Vision in Singapore in November 2014. UCCV is a one day workshop intended to provide a forum to discuss the creation of intuitive, interactive and accessible computer vision technologies.

The majority of researchers in computer vision focus on advancing the state-of-the-art in algorithms and methods; there is very little focus on how the state-of-the-art can be usefully presented to the majority of people. Research is required to provide new technology to address the shortcomings in the usability of computer vision.

UBC's Electrical and Computer Engineering department has a large, diverse and successful research community, offering many collaboration opportunities for local and national companies. The Research Open Day provides an occasion to engage with members of the department, see the lateset research and network within the wider community.

Senior researchers from ECE will give short, high-level talks on their recent advances and graduate students will present their work in the atrium during networking sessions. Representatives from Applied Science Industry Partnerships, University-Industry Liaison Office (UILO), entrepreneurship @ UBC and granting organizations NSERC and Mitacs will give talks on strategies for collaboration. There will be opportunities to discuss research ideas, collaboration and commercialization during the coffee breaks and provided lunch.

The invitation is open to all - please join us for this full-day event showcasing the unique research within ECE.

We are pleased to announce the 1st Workshop on User-Centred Computer Vision (UCCV'13), to be held as part of the IEEE Winter Vision Meetings in Tampa, Florida, U.S.A. in January 2013. UCCV is a one day workshop intended to provide a forum to discuss the creation of intuitive, interactive and accessible computer vision technologies.

The majority of researchers in computer vision focus on advancing the state-of-the-art in algorithms and methods; there is very little focus on how the state-of-the-art can be usefully presented to the majority of people. Research is required to provide new technology to address the shortcomings in the usability of computer vision.

The OpenVL team is organising the first workshop on Developer-Centred Computer Vision

The majority of research in computer vision is focused on technology and systems which advance the state-of-the-art, however there is very little focus on how we can make the state-of-the-art useable by the majority of people. Recently there has been an increased interest in "Vision for HCI", and how we use computer vision to interact with the world. We propose a parallel theme of "HCI for Vision" for this workshop, looking at how to provide accessible computer vision targeted towards general software developers. We would like to explore ideas which take existing vision methods and present them in a manner where users with varying degrees of vision knowledge may use them.

There has been a relatively recent surge in the number of developer interfaces to computer vision becoming available: OpenCV has become much more popular, Mathworks have released a Matlab Computer Vision Toolbox, visual interfaces such as Vision-on-Tap are online and working, and specific targets such as tracking (OpenTL) and GPU (Cuda, OpenVIDIA) have working implementations. Additionally, in the last six months Khronos (the not-for-profit industry consortium which creates and maintains open standards) has formed a working group to discuss the creation of a computer vision hardware abstraction layer (CV HAL).

Developing methods to make computer vision accessible poses many interesting questions and will require novel approaches to the problems. This one day workshop will bring together researchers in the fields of Vision and HCI to discuss the state-of-the-art and the direction of research. There will be peer-reviewed demos and papers, with three oral presentation sessions and a poster session. We invite the submission of original, high quality research papers and demos on accessible computer vision. Areas of interest include (but not limited to):

• Higher-level abstractions of vision algorithms
• Algorithm/Task/User level API design
• Automatic/interactive algorithm selection based on human input
• Automatic/interactive task selection based on human input
• Interpretation of user input such as descriptions, sketches, images or video
• Case-studies on developer-centred computer vision
• Visual development environments for vision system construction
• Evaluation of vision interfaces (e.g. through user studies)

GRAND 2012 will showcase a multi-disciplinary program of research and innovation across the broad spectrum of digital media topics and issues, with presentations from researchers across Canada. I am one of the chairs for the Research Notes session.

The majority of researchers in computer vision focus on technology and systems which advance the state-of-the-art, however there is very little focus on how we can make the state-of-the-art useable by the majority of "ordinary" people. Additionally, more research is required to provide interactive or accessible techniques to address the shortcomings in current computer vision solutions.

Developing methods to make computer vision accessible poses many interesting questions and will require novel approaches to the problems. This one day workshop will bring together researchers in the fields of accessible and interactive computer vision to discuss the state-of-the-art and the direction of research.

As part of the Winter Vision Meetings I organised the Workshop on Person-Oriented Vision which was held in Keauhou, Kailua-Kona, Hawai'i on the 7th of January 2011. The workshop highlighted ongoing research in accessible and interactive computer vision, as well as providing an opportunity for discussions on new directions for the field. We invited work on the following topics:

• Transforming CV problems to exploit meaningful user interaction
• High-level abstractions of vision algorithms
• Automatic or interactive algorithm selection based on user input
• Detection/tracking/recognition of a physical person as input to an interactive system
• Interpretation of user input such as descriptions, sketches, images or video
• Automatic or interactive parameter tuning for vision algorithms
• Case studies on "Person-Oriented" CV
• Vision systems designed for use by non-experts
• Interactive/supervised correction of weaknesses in the current state-of-the-art

The workshop was held in Keauhou, Kailua-Kona, Hawai'i on 7th January 2011 as part of the Winter Vision Meetings.