Computer Vision News - March 2018

31 Adriana Romero Will you be a teacher throughout your career? That is a question that I don’t know the answer to. When I started my PhD, I always thought that I was doing a PhD for academic purposes. I wanted to have an academic career, become a professor, and so on. Things have changed a lot since I started my PhD. Now, in the machine learning field, there are numerous opportunities in the industry in great research labs… at the university as well, of course. I wanted to give industry a shot as well. I never tried that before and I was curious about that. What were your dreams as a kid? [ Laughs ] As a kid, you are exposed to so many different subjects and so many different things. I think that many kids are interested in many things. For me, it was changing a lot. I didn’t have one specific dream. I was enjoying many subjects so probably if I had to pick my favorite subject as a kid, it would be for sure math and languages. I always had a thing for learning new languages. I really liked that as well. As I grew older, my interests became broader, but mainly focused in STEM-related fields. That ended up shaping my career in this direction, but I wouldn’t say that I always had a dream or a goal that I wanted to achieve or accomplish. I was shaping my path as I was following my steps. You are still very young, but it seems you made a lot of important choices. You were not born in Montreal, am I right? I’m originally from Barcelona. So you are Catalan? Yes. You made many choices, not the least that of studying science in a foreign country. What was the most difficult choice that you have made? That’s a great question. I think that every decision that we make can be quite challenging. I can think of several points in my life where that happened. Probably the first one was in terms of my Bachelor’s degree and deciding what I should study. That was really hard in a sense because I really liked a lot of subjects. I was good at math and STEM-related fields, so it made sense for me to follow the research path Women in Science Computer Vision News “I wanted to give industry a shot as well. I never tried that before and I was curious about that. ”