Computer Vision News - March 2019

28 Women in Science Computer Vision News Women in Science huge network of volunteers. We started having this organization. We called it Free Hugs Vietnam. At first, we tried to help foreigners like foreign NGOs. When they come to Vietnam, we help them liaison with the local organizations. We give them volunteers. We have a lot of events for young people like English-speaking clubs and planned competitions. We raised money. We bought meals. We went around and gave meals to homeless people during the holidays. How nice! It’s really nice. I’m really happy. I’m not actually involved with it anymore. There are other young people in charge. You have traveled a lot and met a lot of people, so you have plenty of friends almost everywhere. And of course, your family is very far away. By being in different places all of the time, you certainly miss people. How do you handle this? I feel like the fact that I was able to travel makes me realize that physical distance is not that big of a deal. For me, when I don’t see my friends regularly, I know that if we see each other again, we’re going to be friends again. I’m not traveling that much anymore. I’m mostly in California now. Are you planning a PhD? I’m not doing a PhD. Can you tell me why? I think PhDs are great. I just don’t think that it’s for me. That’s fair enough. Tell me something about NLP. What do you like about it? NLP still has a lot of challenges. I feel like the way that we approach NLP nowadays is not going to solve everything. I see a lot of big, important papers coming out, but I don’t see a fundamental approach to it yet. Actually, I’m very interested in transfer learning for NLP. I’m also very interested in something that I see as a curriculum learning. I feel like children who learn languages have a very small vocabulary and they gradually build it up over time. I’m trying to see whether it’s possible with a model. You start with a dataset of simplified English, and we learn more complex English. So I created a set of children’s books with very simple English, and I’m not sure it’s going to work. It’s an open research problem. Do you believe that human knowledge is going upwards? We’re having less and less unknowns every day, but how far are we from being completely unignorant? I don’t know! Read more interviews like this “We’re having less and less unknowns every day, but how far are we from being completely unignorant?”