Computer Vision News - June 2020

2 Summary Wo en in Computer Vision 42 You are Canadian or American? I’m Canadian. I’m originally from Toronto. What do you miss from Canada? Family and food do not count. Outside of that, I would say, as a kid I used to go camping. Where I grew up, there are a lot of lakes and a lot of beautiful nature. My family and I would always go camping and canoeing. I absolutely miss that. And you certainly ice skated on a pond! Yes, we had a hockey pond growing up. I lived on a farm. Every winter, we would play hockey. It comes as a Canadian. [ both laugh ] If you worked as a semiconductor engineer in Canada, would you still be happy anyway? Yeah, I would be. You can make yourself happy in a lot of different ways. The excitement of the robotics field, that’s what really pulled me over. I think I could really make an exciting career in semiconductors as well. Maybe one day it’ll bridge over, and I’ll get back into it. Once I visited a company that had robots walking around the grounds in the garden, talking to people that arrived. Can you believe it? Going away, I had to wave goodbye. You almost imagine that they are humans. Is this something you’ve experienced? That’s a huge aspect of robotics. Hollywood has really influenced robotics, sometimes in a scary way. There’s this whole field of research looking at how we can make this human interaction with robots a little more pleasant, and a little more human. Sometimes we don’t want to know that it’s a robot. We want it to seem more human. What should humans learn from robots? Do you see anything good in robots that you would love for you or your friends to learn? Maybe something along the lines of persistence. Robots, they never stop. In that sense, they are hard working. I base some of my choices on that. You have to be hardworking. Persistence is a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing. It depends on which way you are going. I can imagine a robot hammering a nail without ever stopping. Another thing they should learn is the aspect of learning. Robots have to learn to understand their environment, and "I have fallen so many times. There are always going to be people around you to guide you and support you"