CVPR Daily - Thursday

DAILY T h u r s d a y David Fouhey 10 David Fouhey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in the Computer Science and Engineering department. David, it is a pleasure to speak to you again. The last time you were featured in our magazine was in one of Angjoo Kanazawa’s photographs of the ‘Berkeley Crowd’. A lot has changed since then. What is your life like now? It’s a lot busier. I have many wonderful students now. For two of them, it’s their first CVPR, so I’m looking forward to hanging out at the posters with them virtually and answering all the questions. I’m also looking forward to sitting up and drinking coffee with one of my students. It’s important that we ensure everyone can come to the posters and see stuff and we can talk to everybody. Life has certainly changed a lot since the last time I featured, and it’s changed even more since the first time, which was four years ago! How many people are you in the lab now? There are currently eight graduate students and then I have a large number of undergraduates for the summer, which is exciting. Some of them are working remotely. There’s a lot of stuff going on, but it’s really wonderful to work with students. Did you always want to continue in academia and keep teaching? Yes, I have really enjoyed teaching, both in the classroom and getting students excited about computer vision and machine learning. I think it’s important not to hoard knowledge in your head. You have to get it out there. It’s really important for people to learn as much as possible and to teach people and welcome them into the field. Machine learning is very exciting now but there are lots of ways that it can go wrong. As people who have been around a while and seen that, I think it’s important for us to teach the next generation. We don’t want to keep on making the same mistakes. In what way is being an assistant professor different from what you expected? I have to do many more things than I realised! Lots of very different things. David Fouhey