Computer Vision News - February 2018

Computer Vision News 31 Michela Paganini system as well, but it’s different than what I was used to, so I thought I had to make up my mind right away. I decided to study astrophysics actually rather than physics per se - or particle physics, specifically. I applied to some colleges in the United States and was lucky enough to get into Berkeley, which I ended up attending. One of the criteria that I used to make my final decision on which college to attend was the fact that Berkeley has an astrophysics undergraduate program. The astronomy department was separate from the physics department, but they’re obviously very close and well- connected. It’s been a long trajectory for me: I was lucky enough to have this in mind for a long time, but I think there are all sorts of different paths to get to the same point. A lot of people discover their passion later on. That’s what happened with me with machine learning. I had no idea what it was until five years ago. You said that you asked many questions as a kid. What was the toughest question? I think it probably had something to do with some of the questions that we are still trying to answer today in particle physics. We can go back to the 10 -10 seconds after the Big Bang, 10 -15 seconds after the Big Bang, etc. We progressively know less and less about what happened, but we have a degree of knowledge up to a certain point. Then we don’t anymore. And there’s the biggest question of all -- I don’t even know if it’s a rational question to be asking: at a certain point, we want to know about what existed before the Big Bang. What was there before? What was there before? What did space and time expand into? We always try to rationalize these questions in terms of what we can perceive, what we can rationalize, and what our brain is used to. Sometimes it just doesn’t even make sense to ask those questions exactly in those terms. Do you have any guess? [ laughs ] The physicist in me is probably going to cringe a little bit because I don’t actually know what the right answer to that is. I think the point is that time, as we conceive it, started then. There’s no way of asking what was before. I’m actually not a theorist, and I don’t think deeply about these questions anymore. Maybe as a child I was a lot more curious than as an adult. [ laughs ] Michela kind of gave up on these sorts of questions. I don’t have an answer for those, but I sort of learned how to live with that. It’s still worthwhile to ask these sorts of questions, but it’s ok to realize that, at a certain point, you get to the real edge of human knowledge. Growing up is a lot of learning how to deal with the unknown and realizing that the questions you are asking are actually the right questions to be asking if you want to push the boundaries of human knowledge. What function does curiosity have in your Women in Science “ Growing up is a lot of learning how to deal with the unknown and realizing that the questions you are asking are actually the right questions to be asking if you want to push the boundaries of human knowledge ”