Computer Vision News - October 2020

Can you tell us more about your time in Tunisia? I grew up in Tunisia, and all my family is there. I have amazingly supportive parents and family. I have a brother and a sister. Personally, I felt like my parents were always supportive of my decisions. They always saw my vision. My family is the source of my strength and inspiration. When I wanted to go and study abroad, they were extremely supportive. I am born in a north African Muslim country, and I would say that women are very liberal. We pursue higher education and are very ambitious. You can see even nowadays that the top of the class in an elementary school is usually females. We have very strong female leadership, especially in education. You seemany brilliant minds. I remember when I started my lab, one of my colleagues told me, “You have so many females in your lab ”. [ laughs ] I was like, I am not trying to be discriminative against male students, but the brilliant ones who approached me in the start just happen to be females. Even right now, I'm trying to create a balance, but my balance is like the other way. Most of them are female scientists. So there is only a small chance that I would be accepted in your lab… [ both laugh ] Send your CV first. Let's have a look at that! [ laughs ] My CV may be the biggest obstacle… What does Tunisia mean for you today? What place does this place hold in your heart? Right now, Tunisia is one of my strongest drives to keep going, growing, and fundamentally supporting talented minorities and low R&D countries. It's a catalyst. It is a strong drive. It keeps me going. Can you tell us more about your life abroad? I say this to my students, and I am going to say it here, too. I did my undergrad in France, a Computer Science Degree. I got two Masters, one from École Normale Supérieure, in Mathematics, Vision, and Machine Learning and another Masters from ESIEE Paris. I did my PhD in the UK. I thank all my teachers. They were all inspiring. At the University of Edinburgh, I finished in three years and was very successful. I got to go to many conferences in Hawaii and Melbourne, Australia. It was a very fun PhD. However, a turning point in my life, that has spun the wheel and opened up my mind, was when I joined the IDEA Lab at the University of North Carolina under the supervision of Professor Dinggang Shen. That has changed the course of my whole career! I felt like I was re-learning everything from scratch. It was inspirational. I wish that I had that experience way earlier, but I 2 Women in Science 32