Hello everyone,

I was wondering if anyone else have similar feelings with regards to a number of accepted papers coming from Chinese universities/authors presented in ICCV. Thus far in the conference, I came across quite a lot of papers with questionable motives which made me question the ethical consequences.

These papers are, for the most part, concerned with various forms of person identification (i.e., typical big brother stuff). In fact, when you look at the accepted papers, more than 80% of any kind of identification papers have Chinese authors/affiliations.

But that’s not all, some papers go to extreme lengths of person re-identification such as:

1- Occluded person re- identification (i.e., person re-identification through mask/glass)

2- Person re-identification in low-light environments

3- Cross domain person re-identification

4- Cross dataset person re-identification

5- Cross modality person re-identification

6- Unsupervised person re-identification

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And maybe you think person re-identification is all there is, but its not. There are also:

1- Vehicle identification, vehicle re-identification, vehicle re-identification from aerial images

2- Occluded vehicle recovery

3- Lip reading from video sequences

4- Crowd counting in scenes, crowd density prediction, and crowd counting in aerial pictures (in fact, all but one crowd counting papers are China affiliated)

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I wonder whether I am being overly sensitive due to recent influx of news about Uighurs in China and Hong Kong protests etc. or if these papers are basically funded by the Chinese government (or its extensions) for some big brother stuff.

What is your opinion on the research on these subjects which can be used for some ethically questionable applications getting published in top conferences?

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Edit: I should mention that I did not mean to offend any Chinese researchers and I am of course aware that many great inventions in recent ML/DL research that we use came from Chinese researchers. What I stated above is merely my observation while passing by the posters in the conference.