Computer Vision News - July 2018

Tuesday 15 Nasrin Mostafazadeh lots and lots of knowledge and has not been really revolutionized in the past decade, I would say. Whereas a lot of pattern recognition such as image processing and speech recognition have been revolutionized, which is the example that I was making in my talk. What made people change their approach? The deep learning revolution or something else? What has happened in the vision community is the abundance of data which has enabled existing algorithms which have been around for decades and decades such as deep learning to work actually. On top of that, we have much more computing power such as a lot of GPU’s which many big companies have access to these days. They have given rise to the so-called deep learning revolution, which has definitely made a huge change in pattern recognition problems. Regardless of your excellent accent, I understand that you are not American- born. Where do you come from? Oh, wow! My accent is excellent then? [ laughs ] I think so! Oh, thank you! I’m Iranian. I came to the US five and a half years ago. I was born and raised in Iran. I went to school in Iran. When did you discover that you would like to study language? Ah well, the story goes all the way back to high school. Actually, I started working on natural language processing and natural language understanding in high school. The story that I told about how I got into natural language understanding from robotics was in high school. I started working on RoboCup competitions when I was like 15 or so. Then through that classical natural language example that I just told you, I really was excited to work on a problem that people called AI- complete. I can tell you the story of how I got exposed to natural language. Please do! It’s just a bit long. [ laughs ] We like long stories! Here’s the story. We were me and a couple of my amazing friends, we had this robotics team, as I said. Because of that team, we wanted to compete in international RoboCup competitions. It meant a lot of hard work. For about more than a year, maybe a year and a half, we just pushed on that agenda. We had a team, and we wanted to win. Through that, we didn’t go to any of our classes in school. We had this amazing school that let us do this. The end of that part is that it was successful. We became actually the second in the world,