Computer Vision News - December 2016

computer science in the first few years. Later, it was a mix of computational linguistics, computational vision, and computational cognitive science. CVN: What was your experience during your formative years that made you a scientist? What did it teach you about your current approach to education? Zoya: I’m going to answer it a little on the side. In terms of my view on educating children about computer science and how that could have influenced me. When I first learned about computer science, I wasn’t so interested in it. When I talked to other children my age, the ones that were really interested in it were the ones that played video games. That aspect of it never appealed to me. That was the way that it was mostly taught to children in school. Unless you played video games, there weren’t quite the right approaches to teaching children about computer science. I do have strong opinions about that because I think that it ends up cutting off children from understanding that computer science is also a tool and not for the purpose of entertainment or playing games. CVN: You were taught that a minute not spent learning is a minute lost. Is that right? Zoya: My dad taught me this drive to pack new knowledge into every minute . I find myself at home picking up new things and reading them. It doesn’t have to be in the computer science field. I have this picture in my head, when my dad took a piece of paper and said: “If you are going to learn something now, it is this dot on a piece of paper. Everything you learn is these dots. Don’t you want to fill the sheet?” You want to remove these blank spaces and fill it as much as possible. My view is that if I fully concentrate on my field and read papers in my field, I will fill a very dense piece of this paper. If I have interest in physics, biology, neuroscience, finance, and so on, it’s further along on this piece of paper. If they can connect to the denser parts, I might have new thoughts that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I am a deep believer of really expanding knowledge because it makes you think faster. Maybe two parts of your brain that weren’t connected suddenly connect, and you have this quick pathway. It allows creativity to develop. CVN: Is a minute spent teaching a minute lost or does it enter into learning? Computer Vision News Women in Computer Vision 17 Women in Science “ I get very excited when I have a connection between ideas that I didn’t have before or that didn’t already exist in the literature ”