Computer Vision News - March 2017

contacts with customers. Then, thanks to one of my bosses, I returned to R&D, to work on one of the first personal visual recorder systems at the time. R&D enabled me to expand my technical expertise. When a company allows you this, it’s something that you can value and you can stay there for a long period of time. When did you discover your passion for science? I’ve always been fond of new ideas, inventions, and technologies since I was a child. I was reading many books about people like Leonardo Da Vinci and so on. I was really fascinated by his inventions and by his working transversally on several subjects. And I was very fond of math! In time, I was also very fond of medicine, especially the brain mechanism. These were my interests during the first years of my childhood. Were you supported by teachers and family? Yes, absolutely. My father is a very brilliant engineer, passionate of math and sciences. He’s the one who made me love these subjects, which in secondary school were taught to me by a very good teacher, Professor Zanotti: she helped me doing what I wanted to do. At that time, did you know that you would work in the industry or did you also consider a career in academia? I wanted to be in the industry. Though I wanted to study new things and work in R&D, I also wanted to see it in practice, in real systems with real products. I think that is what ideas should evolve into. And anyway we have a lot of contact with the university, so I’m not missing that. What do you like the most in having such a long stint in the industry? What I find astonishing is the acceleration of product development. When I started in R&D, while approaching a new subject, it took us years, from the very early start until we could see the final product. This is not true anymore: we’re getting there faster and faster. Now that we’ve started to work in deep learning and artificial intelligence, the speed will continue to increase. The same is true not only for the product, but also for the technology and so on. Another thing is the fact that now all of the various fields are converging. All are going to be interconnected. There are a lot of implications systemwide. This also makes it interesting to work at ST, because we are touching all of these areas and we can better integrate the various solutions. Can you tell us more about your work? The Internet of Things is an emerging field application: everything is interconnected. Our company is very much involved in developing sensors of various nature: imaging, inertial, microphones, environmental and more. To explain my work in distributed intelligence, it means that we see an evolution in the systems, which are not Computer Vision News Women in Computer Vision 23 Women in Science Viviana (back row, 5 th from left) with the other winners of the award