Computer Vision News - June 2021

Thank you! That's what I’m here for! [ both laugh ] The most wonderful part of being a researcher and being a professor is that it’s my daily job to be “wowed”. I did my undergrad degree in aerospace engineering, also at MIT. Right up until my senior year, I was a double major in physics. I needed one more lab class to finish that double major in physics. I really loved physics. I liked the beauty of it. One of my motivations is to connect technology with humankind, to understand what it is we know about the world and the universe. Then my senior year, instead of taking that last physics lab class, I took basically an intro to artificial intelligence class. I wasn’t sure if it was the right decision. There were PhD students and faculty that came through and presented the latest ongoing work from their lab. I remember looking at a video of a walking robot, balancing and jumping. Now we have real robots in the world. But that didn’t exist yet. It was just in simulation. I remember when Cynthia Breazeal came, a pioneer in social robotics: she came to this class to talk about how she was pushing the field of how robots interact in a socio-emotional context. From each of those talks, I just felt that what they were doing was magic. It was indistinguishable from magic. I knew it wasn’t magic! I knew I could probably learn how to create systems with those Women in Science 32 capabilities. The wonderful thing about my job is that I feel some version of that wonderful feeling of “wow” every week, if not every day, interacting with my students when they show me results on their latest direction of work, being inspired by colleagues in another meeting. I definitely chose the right career path overall. That’s why it’s so hard for me to pick one! Of all the things people expect robots to do in the future, which one is an illusion that will never happen? I know to never say never! There are many things that are not likely truly impossible. I can tell you what I spend most of my time worrying about. I don’t worry about singularity. I don’t worry about generalized artificial intelligence. What I worry about are the technologies that are here and now, or that will be here in the next ew years, and the thoughtfulness that we’re putting into guiding and shaping the direction of that technology development and the effort and thoughtfulness we’re putting into those technologies right