CVPR Daily - Friday

to the University of Surrey. In the first two months, I worked on face morphing. You are given two identities, and ideally, both identities look similar. The task is to find a morphed face that confuses the recognition system. Our intention was not to generate the morphs but to identify the morphs afterward, but if you look at morph applications, you will see there are not many data sets available. Detection of morphing algorithms is not generalizable because there is no data. So we thought first we had to generate a really good morphed image and then apply the detection. Then there was an urge to move to self-supervised learning, which I have been doing ever since. What brought a young girl from Egypt to work in self-supervised learning in Surrey? All my life, I have had a passion for teaching. I realized this in high school, and it grew during my bachelor’s . In Egypt, you determine which university you attend based on your high school grades. In high school, I got really high grades that qualified me to go to a good university, but I wanted to go to a lower-ranked university so that I could teach. My parents were opposed to this. They said, “ No, this is crazy! ” People were paying a lot of money to go to a private university. So I went into computer science and engineering. I understand your parents were ambitious for you … Yes, but all I was thinking about was teaching! However, I accepted it and went to a computer science university. I started to enjoy it a lot. I started to enjoy programming. I thought it could be a good way to teach by following academia. I continued my master's and PhD and then start teaching. Towards the end of my bachelor’s, one of the doctors there asked me if I wanted to continue in research. I welcomed the idea! I started my master’s at Nile University in Egypt. The problem in Egypt is that you don't have many resources. If I want to try something, it has to be very limited. We don't have GPUs. We don't have anything. I felt passionate about deep learning and machine learning, but we were not using those at that time in Egypt. That’s why I wanted to go abroad, so I went to Sony in Stuttgart, Germany. There I worked in deep learning, and oh my God, I enjoyed it a lot! It was amazing working with such great minds like these people. You felt like you were 22 DAILY CVPR Women in Computer Vision Friday