I completely agree. I have been on ICCV this year (only 7500 participants) and found it really difficult to find people who I would like to talk to (e.g. because they had a nice presentation). The number of submissions has doubled since the last time (two years ago) [0]. It is just a constant overflow of information and the conference (including workshops, which were pretty good) lasted seven days.
I think these ML/DL conferences need to be split up and specialize more to manage the interest.
Don't get me wrong I think this is an impressive feat and I am always impressed to see universities pull off these kinds of complex system and control projects. Yet, there are a few things that I would like to mention.
The article says that the car does "doughnuts with inhuman precision" and they want to develop vehicles that can handle "emergency maneuvers or slippery surfaces like ice or snow". In this context, I feel this demo falls a bit short. The car can drive with superhuman precision, but it also gets superhuman capabilities like inch-precision localization (and an IMU is my guess) or superhuman steering wheel turning speeds. And the vehicle is heavily modified for this specific use-case. Drifting looks stable in the video but I really cannot judge how much easier it is with this car than a normal car. In addition, the asphalt also looks fresh and clean. I would like to see what happens if it suddenly encounters wet surfaces (or ice).
Inch precision localization isn't out of the grasp of human drivers. Kimi Raikkonen at Monaco coming millimetetd from the walls repeatedly comes to mind.
It also isn't out of the abilities of a bog standard optical SLAM+IMU.
Correct in this case. And to a pro driver, this is not drifting. This is donuts. Mashing the gass to lose grip is the lowest tier of 'drifting'. Real drifting as racers do it uses mostly the momentum and changing inerta from braking at corner entry to get sideways, using the gas only to modulye traction. That can be done in any car, fwd included.
[0] https://github.com/hoya012/ICCV-2019-Paper-Statistics