CVPR Daily - Tuesday

people have asked me: were you able to study the same way that men did in Iran? Well, our magazine has interviewed many impressive women from Iran. I think you already know too much! Sorry! [ both laugh ] What is the thing that you regret that you have in Iran that you don’t have here? Family! They are there? Of course. Iranians, almost all of them, or a lot of them, get single entry visas. Then they become students in the US. Because there is no US embassy in Iran. It’s a huge risk to leave the US after you’ve come here to obtain a new visa. People end up staying here for long, long times without seeing their families. Also, getting tourist visas for families is very hard, if not impossible. I was lucky. I got a multiple entry for two years. I could go back to Iran twice, but I was a huge exception. Now, I’ve been here for four and a half years without being able to present my work at different conferences when they were outside of the US or to see my family. There are many other Iranians who have had it much worse than I have had. They have been here for eight years, nine years without seeing their families. It’s just cruel, right? It’s super hard. People keep up with it because they have to, but it’s really, if you think about it, it’s just terrible. It’s really hard. What about ups and downs? I’ll tell you this story. Once I read about a financial recession, decades ago. Many people really stressed about their job prospects. They thought that everyone would go down, and they would lose their houses. Now, you zoom out the graphs of the economic growth throughout the years, and look at that point in time: it looks like a little blip. A tiny blip, which at the time seemed like a disaster. I would say that in life, you have so many such blips. The only thing you can do is to make sure that when you are living it, be mindful of the fact that when you zoom out, it would have been nothing. Try not to stress. It’s hard when you are in the middle of something bad that is happening to you. It’s so easy to lose sight of the big picture, things that you have, and how much things really matter. Just saying “ shake it off ”, doesn’t work. I think sometimes reminding yourself of the fact that however desperate, helpless, and sad you feel, it’s just a blip in your life. That can maybe help you to get through it more easily. How long will it take until an AI can replace me in doing this interview, with laughs and all? The full interview with all the breaks and pauses, in the same way that you did it? I will say 30 years from now! 20 Tuesday Nasrin Mostafazadeh “It’s just a blip...”