Computer Vision News - July 2019

Jelena Frtunikj is an expert in automated driving. Currently, she works at BMW in Munich, Germany as a researcher and engineer developing safe (ISO 26262 & SOTIF) End2End features of highly and fully automated vehicles by using sensor fusion and machine learning algorithms. At CVPR 2019 she has organized the workshop Dependable Deep Detectors: Verification and Certification of Neural Networks . Read more interviews with women scientists Thanks a lot for the invitation. I was very surprised! Why were you surprised? I don’t know how someone could discover me for CVPR Daily. Maybe you can tell me how! [ laughs ]. We want to learn about you. So tell us about your work. I work at BMW working on topics of autonomous driving. I work on a topic where we combine machine learning and safety, which means I work on an algorithm which does perception. I bring my safety knowledge because that’s the background that I have and that I got during my PhD, in order to understand how to make deep neural networks safe. It means that if autonomous cars do not crash into another in the future, we will owe it to you. Exactly…[ laughs ] actually that’s my goal. I wanted to stronger tackle the topic of safety. It’s not that we are just developing a prototype. We are developing something that will go to the market, and we have to make sure that it’s safe. Since I have a background also in computer science, it was not difficult for me to do. I have learned about neural networks and so on before. So you were the right person, at the right moment, at the right place. How long have you been with BMW? On the first of July, it will be exactly three years. Congratulations! Thank you. Tell us something about BMW that we don’t know. Many people think that BMW is a very traditional company. Many people think that only Germans work there, and it’s not so international. Actually, that’s completely not the case for the autonomous driving department. We are so international. In my team, we are ten people. I’m actually not German, I am from Macedonia. We have an Iranian. We have a guy from India and another one from China. We have a Spanish guy. Of course, we have 32 DAILY CVPR Tuesday Women in Comp. Vision