Computer Vision News - April 2020

3 Summary Mehrnoosh Sameki 25 That’s actually a very, very awesome question! I would definitely take another one in social studies, or sociology, or psychology. I feel like, right now, I learned a lot about the technology side, and how technology is affecting people. I’m learning a lot about people in different fields, the effects onpeople, andhow it can impact their lives, their mental health, and so many different aspects. Definitely if I could get another degree, I would study people. I can relate to that because my degree is in social science. And we are speaking through a Microsoft product, which is Skype. That’s another connection! [ both laugh ] How did you find out that you wanted to become a computer scientist? I started by studying computer engineering at Sharif University in enable such tools in Azure machine learning too, so that our Azure and cloud customers can have these off-the-shelf AI toolkits when they train and deploy machine learning models. This sounds very exciting, Mehrnoosh! How did you get there? I did a PhD in computer science at Boston University. My focus was human computation and crowdsourcing. I was always very fascinated with the intersection of humans and technology, or in this particular case, artificial intelligence. Then I started a job as a data scientist for about a year and a half where I learned a lot about how companies use machine learning in data science in action. Prior to that, all my experience was at school, on a smaller scale. My experience as a data scientist helped me a lot to understand the actual process of deploying a machine learning system. After that, I got connected to Microsoft, and I realized that they have this opportunity, that they are looking for a product manager to drive efforts behind responsible AI. It’s a sort of interdisciplinary nature of investigating how humans are being affected by AI, and in general, by technology. It’s a v ery great fit for me. So that’s how I started my position at Microsoft. You have done a full academic path in computer science. If you could earn a degree in anything else, what would it be?