Computer Vision News - February 2018

28 Computer Vision News Women in Computer Vision Michela Paganini ...And also a future member of FAIR... It’s official. I signed my contract. I haven’t made a public announcement or anything besides perhaps on Twitter, but yes I will be a postdoctoral researcher at Facebook AI Research next year after graduation. Twitter is sort of a public domain. I guess that’s true! Can you tell us about your work? I am a physics PhD student. A lot of my work revolves around using machine learning to facilitate physics searches at The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which is the European organization for nuclear research. I’m currently involved in all sorts of projects in the ATLAS Experiment: we are trying to test machine learning algorithms to either speed up or simplify methods to make them even more powerful than they are at the moment. Why do you find this field particularly interesting? I think there are a lot of open problems, a lot of low hanging fruit as well. It’s a very exciting field. Obviously machine learning has been a part of the way in which we work at CERN for decades now. Certainly, it’s nothing new. Deep learning, itself, has only really made an impact for maybe the last five, at most ten, years, I would say. There’s a lot that can be done with better algorithmic thinking and better algorithmic design. The questions that we are trying to answer are also extremely interesting to me personally. They are maybe more abstract in the sense that they don’t necessarily affect people’s lives tomorrow, but there are deeper questions about the universe, about what matter is really made of, what this universe we live in is made of… where we all come from in all of this. I think both the daily job and the big picture are very exciting to me. There’s really so much to be done, and there are so many open questions that you never spend a day without something to do. As a matter of fact, perhaps even the most frustrating thing to me is trying Michela Paganini is a PhD student at Yale University in the Department of Physics and an affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Michela is also a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN. Women in Science