CVPR Daily - Tuesday

At CVPR 2019, Vagia Tsiminaki presents her paper: 3D Appearance Super-Resolution With Deep Learning , along with Yawei Li, Radu Timofte, Marc Pollefeys, Luc Van Gool, which tackles the problem of retrieving high- resolution (HR) texture maps of objects captured from multiple viewpoints. Read more interviews with women scientists Vagia, can you tell us about your work? First of all, thanks a lot for inviting me. Now, I have recently joined IBM Research in Zurich in the computer vision team. We are working on a spatial cognition project. Tell us about this. We are curious to know what you do! It’s still at the beginning of this project. It’s been just one week since I started. The spatial cognition project is to reconstruct the scene. It is 3D reconstruction and 3D understanding. Congratulations on the new position. I know you have been at ETH for the last several years. What did you do there? I was a postdoc for CVG, Computer Vision and Geometry Group, for one and a half years with Marc Pollefeys. There I was working on 3D and super- resolving the appearance of 3D models. We extended my previous model-based approach. We have a paper here. We studied how to use deep learning techniques to super- resolve the appearance of 3D models. You were not born in Zurich. Can you tell us more about where you come from? I’m Greek. I grew up on an island, Kalymnos. I finished school there, and then I moved to enter university to finish my first master’s in the electrical engineering department in Thessaloniki in Greece. I worked for one more year in a research institute in Greece. Then I decided to continue and go abroad. I visited Lausanne. I did another master’s in the computer science department. In Lausanne, I tried to expand my research activities in computer vision. I was also at Idiap in Martigny, where I joined the social computing group. Tell me something about Kalymnos. Make us dream! It’s a small island. It’s not touristy at all. It’s really beautiful with small, rocky beaches. Do you still have family there? Yes, my family still lives there. I grew up there so I try to go often. What is special about Kalymnos? 18 DAILY CVPR Tuesday Women in Comp. Vision