Computer Vision News - October 2020

Islem Rekik is an Assistant Professor at the Istanbul Technical University in Turkey. She is also the Founder and Director of the Brain And SIgnal Research & Analysis (BASIRA) Lab. Islem, tell us what you do at the BASIRA Lab. We do a lot of research about the brain. We use non-invasive neuro-imaging to understandhowthebrainworks andhow it evolves. We explore how neurological disorders emerge. We try to primarily design predictive intelligence that revolves around brain data to foresee the evolution of the brain and changes in typical and also atypical subjects. W hat fascinates you about the brain? Oh my God, so many things! [ laughs ] We have time. What fascinates me most about the brain is, well there are many things. One thing is that I love learning about different things like astronomy, physics, astrophysics, even metaphysics. But, when I started learning about the brain, I thought this is the most complex, yet fascinating systemin thewholeuniverse. Can you imagine, for example, in a single cubic centimeter in the brain, the number of neurons is almost equivalent to the number of stars in the Milky Way our galaxy! The brain is massive. I think we have just started to understand a 2 Women in Science 8