15 Khadija Iddrisu Computer Vision News Khadija Iddrisu is a PhD researcher at Dublin City University and works with the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics in Ireland. Read 100 FASCINATING interviews with Women in Computer Vision Khadija, you’renot Irish, are you? No, I’mGhanaian. I’mfrom Ghana. How is it to be a scientist from Ghana? This is actually a very intriguing question. In Ghana, there are not a lot of scientists, I would say, in the field of machine learning and AI. It’s just a few people. But for now, I’m part of the Women in Machine Learning, and our agenda is to try to get so many people to pursue research in STEM and AI and related areas. When did you understand that you were going to be a scientist? It started in my undergraduate studies. It was when Covid started, and by then, I was a computer science student, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do after school, so you would find me doing graphic designing, you would find me doing web designing, and it was just like a whole lot of mess! [laughs] When Covid came, and there was a long break, we were not sure when we were going back to school. One time I saw a flyer that said they are having six weeks training in AI. On the flyer, there was a robot, and I like to watch sci-fi movies, so the robot caught my attention. I said that I wanted to know how people build robots, so I would go for this training. Afterwards, I realized it wasn’t just about robots, it was aboutAI. At the end of it, I did a project, and this project was about trying to use computer vision to detect disease in poultry. Even though this project was not a success because by then we didn’t have a lot of datasets and AI was new in Ghana as well, I was just so fascinated by the fact that we can use computer vision to solve problems in almost every field. I just became interested, and I knew that I wanted to pursue further studies in this area, and that is what got me here. How prepared were you for the challenge that awaited you? I’vemet a lot of people on my career path, and they have acted as sort of like career guides, and they are people that I can always go to for advice. Alex [Alessandro Crimi], for instance, he’s a very great person, and he has advised me to work on several projects. With these people, I felt like it would be much easier. Regarding your school path, was it good enough for you to get in contact with complicated technological challenges for a PhD? My undergraduate was very challenging because, by that time, we were not doing a lot of coding, and even if we code, sometimes, during exams, we have to write programs on paper. It was really
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