CVPR Daily - Tuesday

How many people are you now? We are about 35 and growing. We are hiring for several positions. We’ve been much bigger at different points. It depends on the number of co-op and students we have. At one point, we had 16 co-op and students! It’s a very talented team. I am so proud of everyone on our team. My dream is to have a team that we call family. We are happy, working together toward the same shared goal. Are you a better scientist or a better manager? I cannot say I am really, really good at science or I am really, really good at management, but I try to be the best version of myself in both every day. I love my science hat really because it’s just easier to make scientific decisions. Management is very complex. You have HR. You have other people. You have business decisions. It’s so complicated for a person with a business hat and a science hat to make decisions sometimes. If I had a choice, I think one day I would go back to academia, or at least I will be more on the research side and working with the students. There is great work in recent publications. We need more talent to come and just say, “ Let’s make it happen. Let’s bring it to life. Let’s learn from it. Let’s improve it and validate it and really see that we are contributing to patient outcomes, also on the medical side, not just in publications. ” That is what I say we need more of. I encourage all students, researchers, and scientists to be part of implementation, of contributing to build a product. That’s what we need. There is one thing that strikes me. You have a big block of things in your life: your science, your work, your family. They are very much intertwined. At the same time, we haven’t heard about where you come from. You lived in Iran for 27 years. How does your upbringing affect your life today? Who we are today is the result of all those efforts, training, the way we grew up in our family, our parents and how much they contributed to our success. They tell me I look different, specifically compared to other women. This is me. This is the way I was raised. My dad gave me freedom to make decisions and to try things that probably were not common in the culture that I was raised in. You raise your 22 DAILY CVPR Tuesday Women in Computer Vision