The Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) found itself at the center of a heated controversy after a prominent researcher took to Twitter to condemn what he described as "baseless political statements" made during one of the talks in its annual conference, during which he noticed that the slide in one of the presentations ran the headline "How has CPR research contributed to tech used in genocide in Palestine."
I was deeply offended by a slide in a recent talk at #CVPR2024 that falsely accused my country of genocide. Such baseless political statements have no place in our scientific community. Let's keep our focus on advancing science and leave politics at the door. @CVPR pic.twitter.com/WucHUoNHcd
— Yizhak Ben-Shabat (Itzik) 💔 @CVPR✈️ (@sitzikbs) June 18, 2024
The IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) calls itself "the premier annual computer vision event" and it includes "comprising the main conference and several co-located workshops and short courses. This year it has been taking place in Seattle, starting on Monday, and it will continue through Friday.
Yizhak Ben-Shabat (Itzik), a well-known figure in the field of computer vision, expressed his outrage in a tweet after seeing the slide and uploading it online. He wrote, "I was deeply offended by a slide in a recent talk at #CVPR2024 that falsely accused my country of genocide. Such baseless political statements have no place in our scientific community. Let's keep our focus on advancing science and leave politics at the door. @CVPR". The slide, apart from supposedly accepting the falsehood that Israel was carrying out genocide in the Gaza Strip, also listed Israeli and international companies as supposedly being embroiled in this made-up claim.
The companies listed on the slide, according to the picture he showed, included Elbit (an Israeli company), with its "weapons and drones"; Amazon through its "cloud compute for military", Palantir, through its "AI targeting for bombing" and Lockheed Martin, through its "missiles and weapons."
Call for separating science and politics
Ben-Shabat's tweet, according to a later tweet on the same thread, was directed at a slide that appeared in a presentation during the conference's Workshop on Responsible Data, which aimed to address issues surrounding the inclusivity and diversity of datasets used in machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.
Thank you. It was presented here: https://t.co/uNGAK8RAn0
— Yizhak Ben-Shabat (Itzik) 💔 @CVPR✈️ (@sitzikbs) June 18, 2024
The thread prompted a major backlash online, with pro-Israeli users attacking the conference for allowing the slide to appear. There was no information on who presented it and whether it was cleared with the organizers for the event before the workshop. The organizers have yet to respond to the allegations.
