Computer Vision News - July 2018

Thursday 35 Adriana Kovashka I think we need to look at images from this point of view as well. I also hope that hearing the talks and what people have to say during brainstorming sessions will help me and others shape this idea in a more concrete, approachable fashion. Maybe we’ll identify some tasks that we can work on that are actually approachable, because advertisements are really broad. The images, being very broad, require a vast range of techniques. This is something that VQA (Visual Question Answering) grapples with. I hope that the community has made progress in identifying approachable tasks. I hope we can do the same for advertisements. All readers are invited [Room 150 DEF]. Let’s go back to your work outside of this workshop. How long have you been in your current position? I’ve been Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh a little over three years. I got my PhD in 2014 from the University of Texas at Austin. I was working with Kristen Grauman. What is your regular work? [ both laugh ] My “real work”! So it’s primarily research with some amount of teaching. My job is to train graduate students to become good researchers, which is very interesting and also very challenging. Some graduate students are made to be researchers. Some have great technical skills, but maybe don’t have as much appreciation of novelty. You need to train them to be researchers, not just engineers. Working with graduate students has been a very interesting experience. I also do teaching, which is also very rewarding: in the past semester, I taught a graduate and undergraduate vision class. I very much enjoyed the undergraduate actually, because students were deeply interested in the topic. We really see huge excitement. It was very enlightening. In the past, I have struggled with students finding the subject hard. Somehow, this semester, I think we connected a lot more, and there was a lot of fun being had in class. It was a great experience. Did you always dream of becoming a scientist? Hmm… yes! I’ve always been interested in art as well, but I think I’ve been a scientist most of my life. I think that makes more sense for the kind of person that I am. You are not originally from Texas… No, I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, but I’ve been in the US since 2004. I’m not really sure if I’m more European or more American at this point. How can you no longer feel European? As an Italian, I cannot understand that! [ laughs ] Right, well, I’m probably, deep inside, European. That never goes away. Where is home? Home is Sofia, Bulgaria. Will it always be?