Computer Vision News - August 2019

stable or very certain whether or not to stay there for good. So when I was sixteen, my parents asked me if I wanted to study overseas. As a teenager, you want freedom! So I said : “ Yeah, of course!” [laughs] Where is overseas? I went to New Zealand because I have a relative who was already living there. I stayed there with them for a couple of years of high school. I did also my bachelor’s in Electrical engineering in New Zealand. How does an Indonesian teenage girl discover that she has the disposition of a scientist? In my family, there are quite a number of engineers already. Aside from that, when I moved to New Zealand, my English wasn’t very fluent. At that time, when I needed to choose my subjects, I could choose engineering, or maybe commerce. Commerce also requires you to be quite fluent because you have to write a lot of reports, so I chose engineering. “As a teenager, you want freedom” That’s a fascinating story! What happened after you did your bachelor’s in Auckland? My final year project had to do with biometrics, a recognition system based on the silhouette of your hands. That was my first exposure to image-processing and computer vision. I thought, I looked into an opportunity to further study in that area. My mom actually pointed me to the Erasmus program in the EU. She said: “Maybe you can find something that interests you.” Then I found this master’s in computer vision and robotics, so I applied. I was on the reserve list at first, but then luckily I got promoted to the main list, and I got the scholarship. It was two years of master’s with a full scholarship. It was at three different universities. I went to Scotland to the University of Heriot-Watt. Then for the second semester, I moved to the University of Girona in Spain… hmm… in Catalonia. Yes, I have friends who would jump if they heard that. [laughs] In the third semester, I was in France at the University of Burgundy. Bourgogne! Yes! [both laugh] Yes, I don’t want to butcher the pronunciation. I chose the English version. And after France? After France, it was time for the master’s thesis. We were free to choose where we wanted to do it, anywhere in the EU. At that time, the University of Girona offered quite a lot of medical imaging-related projects. I Women in Computer Vision 28