CVPR Daily - Thursday

24 DAILY CVPR Thursday What is the most important lesson that you have learned from a teacher? My PhD supervisor made a really big impact in my life. He told me in the first meeting that in order to be a good scientist, a good researcher, or a good human being, you always have to be able to change your thinking and admit you’re wrong in light of new evidence. Sometimes people say something or teach their students something because they thought it was right. Then new evidence comes out. They realize it’s wrong, but they decide to be silent. A scientist has to be honest! Yes, honesty is the most important thing. This is what I will really try my best to do. I tell people that this is what I know right now, but I could be wrong. If we get new information, we have to update your knowledge. What do you dream of discovering? Autism is a very hard disorder. Parents are really suffering because they cannot communicate with the child. Children grow up suffering because they cannot understand their condition or deal with it. I’m working on it right now, and I really hope that in a few years, maybe four or five years, we can come up with some computational tool that can really make life easier for caregivers of autistic children and autistic children themselves, helping them to really understand how to deal with their emotions and their reactions to things. Is that the main goal of your career? My main goal is to advance healthcare using machine learning and computational tools. This is what I will keep doing. I focus on people who really, really need these tools; infants, people from underrepresented groups, children, people who need help the most. This is who I am interested in helping. What is your message to mankind? That’s not an easy one! It depends on the audience. If the audience is people like me, female, I would tell them the path is hard, but it’s really worth it. Just believe in yourself and keep going: you will make it! If the audience is general, I would tell them that we really, really need, as a community, to reshift our focus on what really matters. Here: there are thousands and thousands of articles on machine learning … I’m not saying that what they’re doing is not important, but I think we need to focus on what matters. We need to think about using machine learning to change peoples’ lives! Read more than 100 interviews with Women in Computer Vision! Women in Computer Vision