Computer Vision News - December 2016

Computer Vision News: Zoya, when did your interest in science start? Zoya Bylinskii: In high school I was interested in psychology and biology. I read books about the brain a lot. I was interested in brain facts and trivia. I read a lot of books about human psychology. At the same time, I was also quite good at math and participated in math competitions. I wasn’t interested in computer science, even though both of my parents are computer scientists. Later, during undergrad, I did decide to pursue a computer science degree in artificial intelligence because I was so interested in studying human psychology and the brain. In this program, I could have access to the right technical tools. A lot of the courses that I took in my first year were high level courses on cognitive science, linguistics, and intro to psychology. As I went along with my program, I also took basic courses in 16 Computer Vision News Women in Computer Vision Zoya Bylinskii - MIT Women in Science We continue our series of interviews with women in computer vision . This new section, which we started with the CVPR Daily at CVPR 2016 , hopes to help mitigate the severe gender imbalance in the computer vision community by getting to know better some remarkable female scientists and their career paths. We think that some of what they did might serve as an example for other young females who wish to enter this field. This month, we interview Zoya Bylinskii , who is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at MIT . “ I want people to have in mind “big eyes” that see widely and really take in the world around them ”