Attending the 3D Vision Conference means confronting 177 accepted papers across 3.5 days, far more than any one person can absorb. Skimming titles the night before isn't enough.
This talk shows how to build a systematic, interactive map of an entire conference using modern open-source tools. We load all 177 papers from 3DV 2026 (full PDF page images plus metadata) into a FiftyOne grouped dataset. We then run three annotation passes using Qwen3.5-9B on each cover page: topic classification, author affiliation extraction, and project page detection. Document embeddings from Jina v4 are computed across all 3,019 page images, pooled to paper-level vectors, and fed into FiftyOne Brain for UMAP visualization, similarity search, representativeness scoring, and uniqueness scoring.
The result is an interactive dataset you can query, filter, and explore in the FiftyOne App. Sort by uniqueness to find distinctive work, filter by topic and sort by representativeness to understand each research area, and cross-reference with scheduling metadata to build a personal agenda.
I demonstrate the end-to-end pipeline and discuss design decisions regarding grouped datasets, reasoning model output parsing, and embedding pooling strategies.