[HN Gopher] Foundations of Computer Vision
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       Foundations of Computer Vision
        
       Author : tzury
       Score  : 113 points
       Date   : 2025-06-15 10:11 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (visionbook.mit.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (visionbook.mit.edu)
        
       | pantulis wrote:
       | There is a very interesting section in the book, "On Research,
       | Writing and Speaking", which includes gems like:
       | 
       |  _"This sounds like hard work." Yes. It's no longer about being
       | smart. By now, everyone around you is smart. In graduate school,
       | it's the hard workers who pull ahead._
        
         | bonoboTP wrote:
         | That's definitely insightful. Everyone reaches a level where
         | coasting on smarts is no longer sufficient.
         | 
         | Many reach this realization when starting university, but some
         | can still coast okay in college since the material to learn is
         | well defined and upper bounded. A PhD is not really upper
         | bounded. There's no set out amount of papers to read per week
         | like in a college course. There's no "this won't be part of the
         | exam". Anything is fair game. The returns on being smarter
         | never flatten out, but simply there's no ceiling. You can
         | always do more, read more to keep up with the literature
         | firehose, improve your experiments, your method, etc.
         | 
         | You also need soft skills and a network. You need to keep your
         | finger on the pulse of the community by going to conferences
         | and getting to know people, grabbing coffee or going out to
         | dinner with them. You also need to be slef driven instead of
         | waiting for instructions like it was in college. You need to be
         | just the right amount of skeptical and critical regarding
         | existing methods to be able to come up with new things while
         | being also understood and accepted and seen relevant and
         | exciting by the community.
         | 
         | You also need to manage your time and set your own deadlines
         | and maintain a routine without the external sync given by
         | university lectures and exams. All this basically has no upper
         | limit and even the expectations are vaguely defined. You face
         | rejections maybe for the first time despite having done a
         | thorough work because the reviewers don't see enough novelty or
         | it doesn't slot neatly into what is in fashion at the moment.
         | 
         | My point is that a PhD can push everyone to meet their mental
         | limits. It can be frustrating and it's a notoriously hard
         | period of time for many PhD students. Of course if your only
         | goal is to graduate to get the doctorate, there are possible
         | strategies to "coast", but those who go for the academic path
         | often expect to achieve more than the bare minimum, especially
         | if they managed to coast with good results in college.
        
       | la_fayette wrote:
       | Unbelievable that this book is freely available! Thanks to the
       | authors, publishers or whoever.
        
         | bonoboTP wrote:
         | The machine learning, computer vision and robotics communities
         | are really great at publishing their books online for free
         | access. You can get the absolute top textbooks of these fields
         | for free online. Quite a contrast to other fields where profs
         | kinda require you to buy the latest edition for hundreds of
         | dollars in the US. Not to mention that this gives access to the
         | best resources everyone around the world in poorer countries as
         | well. Many also share their course materials and videos online.
        
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