Computer Vision News - February 2021

to technique itself: they want to be able to do something with it and have an impact on people. I taught as a professor and I worked in research. Then I joined a small and very innovative enterprise as VP of Engineering: SPG Data. They were specialized invisionandnon-destructive analysis: they scanned aircraft parts for maintenancepurposes and turned them into 3D objects. There, I did inspection and characterized fault detection. How did that fit with your motivations at the time? My professorship was very demanding. It was like five jobs at the same time. So I wanted to be an engineer again who works with real things. Team management and the human aspect of business were among the many things that I learned doing that. Managing people and working with them was a whole new world to me. This is not something that you learn doing a PhD or a post-doc, and I enjoyed dealing with that. Did this experience make you progress in this human aspect? Yes, of course! I learned extraordinary things! We want to know them! In a private business, you must learn to communicate ideas and be able to understand the needs of clients, manage their expectations and explain what you are doing: you need to listen a lot. All the soft skills that you do not learn in a classroom and by which you can see the impact of your technical work. You need to deliver something which fills the client’s needs. When this works well, you can see the impact of your work, which is very rewarding. You see the effects, and you make people happy. Doesn’t everybody enjoy making people happy? What else did you learn then? I also liked to mix the creative aspect of my work with technology and IT. I worked for Avtoma, a small Italian company with a research office in Montreal. I developed algorithms for object recognition in movie sequences to create special effects, like integrating synthetic characters in real world scenes. Working for small companies is so different from academia. University projects take years, while companies compete 24 hours a day with the whole planet and with researchers that work on the same subjects as you do. At the 325 Myriam Côté “I had the romantic vision that an engineer must be creative, to invent things and find solutions.”