Computer Vision News - March 2017

start their career in AI. One of the solutions that women often suggest is mentorship. Is this something that rings a bell for you? Yes. We actually see it can happen naturally at events and at our dinners because it’s a more intimate environment. Lots of the younger attendees have chats with some of the more experienced attendees at the events. Then, naturally a mentorship forms. We’ve seen that happen quite a lot. In your experience, what is the most appealing development in AI, machine learning or computer vision? A topic that really interests me is sustainability in artificial intelligence. This has been something that we’ve touched on at RE•WORK since the very first event. We had presentations on water scarcity and environmental issues. A couple of weeks ago at the deep learning summit in San Francisco, we had a talk from the sustainability and AI lab at Stanford from a research scientist looking at how to apply machine learning satellite imaging to find out how we can predict poverty. We are trying to apply machine learning and AI techniques to solve some of these huge challenges we face. Poverty is obviously a huge one, but also energy is another one that we’ve had a lot of interest in lately. We think about, for example, DeepMind’s announcement last year about energy saving control systems and how they are reducing the data center cooling energy to try and help climate change. How can we apply artificial intelligence to predict weather patterns and use energy saving to try and have an impact on climate change? That’s going to be a big issue in the future. You have picked the one subject that improves lives and also improves our environment… Yes, I think artificial intelligence has a huge spectrum of possible applications, some of which are more impactful than others. Obviously, at our events we do cover things like the finance sector and healthcare which are hugely important, but I think sustainability is really fascinating. It would be great to have more and more research scientists in the field try to apply some of their advancements in deep learning to try and solve some of these huge problems. As you said, it would be beneficial to everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to do the interview. It’s great to be involved and to have your support. We’re really passionate about bringing new interests into artificial intelligence and trying to show that it’s a great career opportunity for new people, specifically for trying to support more women to come into the field. We want to try and encourage positive applications of the technology as much as possible. Computer Vision News Guest 19 Guest “ A topic that really interests me is sustainability in AI ” “ Sustainability is really fascinating ”