Computer Vision News - December 2019

Georgia Gkioxari 31 going on in grad school. It’s a wave. It’s a roller coaster. When I interviewed Jessica Sieren, she told me: “If you’re not having a crisis during your PhD, then you are not doing it right.” Exactly, you have many crises… low points, high points, low points, high points. How do you get through it? Tome, I feel that it was the people. It was the fact that I had my labmates. When you’re in a low point, your friends are going to be very helpful! Your labmates are also going to be helpful because they’re the ones that can give you the confidence that you can actually do this technically. To me, that was very important. I had the moral support from my friends, and I had the technical support from my lab mates. That’s a very inspiring lesson: mentorship and friendships are the way to succeed. Mentorship, not only between an advisor and a student, but also peers, people that are with you all the way. Of all these brilliant people that you worked with, what is the main lesson that you learned from any of them? I think I would say from my advisor, Jitendra, the biggest lesson that I learned from him is to work on important problems, how to distinguish what is important and what is not. That is something that Jitendra has taught me throughout the years, back then until today. Another really big impact was the advice from my other mentor and colleague, Ross Girshick: whatever you do, you have to do it right. What if you don’t? Then take a step back. Reformulate. Rethink. Redo everything. Did this happen to you? Of course - If you’re working on a project in which, at the time of submission, you’re like, “Oh, this is perfect! I’ve solved the problem. Let’s move on.” Then you haven’t solved the real problem. "This team around you that is wonderful, that you can trust, that you can ask for help, that you can talk to if you have technical difficulties for your paper, or personal, when you’re mad, upset, or depressed because of what’s going on in grad school." Best of ICCV 2019