Computer Vision News - April 2019

well. I think that’s one of the reasons they want to come work for my lab. My boss did the same when I started working at RSIP Vision, so I can relate. How old were you when you left Iran? I was very young. I left Iran after my first degree. In my year of graduation from high school, I was the youngest student in my country to enter university I think, I was 15. I went to Imperial College and then I came to the west coast of Canada, the University of British Columbia, to do my PhD. Have you ever thought of how your career would have been different if you had stayed in Iran? [ laughs ] You ask good questions! You ask me about my parallel universe, if I had lived a different life. I think it would have been very similar. I don’t think that there would have been very many differences in what I wanted to do or where I was going to go. I wanted to be an academic. Likely I would have ended up somewhere in academia working with students and trying to make a difference. It would have just been in a very different environment focused on other things. I’ll give you an example. As an undergraduate, I worked in a research lab focused on the control of prosthetic arms. It was an important topic at that time, following several years of war. There were casualties, young people that needed help using their limbs again. This would have made a difference to those people. I think I would have done very similar things, just in a different context, maybe focusing on different priorities in healthcare that every region or country has. Probably you would have arrived to IPCAI anyway. Let’s talk about IPCAI, which is coming up in a few months. Do you want to tell us what makes IPCAI important and what will happen there? IPCAI is a conference that started when people felt a need for like-minded people to get together and focus mainly on information processing for computer-aided interventions. It is a very high-quality conference. Papers are thoroughly reviewed. In fact, all the papers that are accepted are ready for journal publication. We have put in place a dedicated team of program chairs and area chairs that work really hard to provide a program that is unique, that is novel, that is exciting. Something else that is quite exciting is for every paper that is accepted at IPCAI, the authors get an opportunity to have an oral presentation and poster presentation. At our posters, we get a chance to have in-depth discussions. Others like the chance to be on the podium and impress their colleagues about something exciting. At IPCAI, we give them the best of both worlds. They get to be on the podium. 20 Women in Science Computer Vision News Women in Science Photo: Dave Dove