Computer Vision News - May 2023

19 Abby Stylianou This is a project that started while I was actually still a PhD student. It was with Robert Pless, who was my PhD advisor at Washington University in St. Louis: he was amazingly supportive and kind to let me have free reign to do what I wanted to do. I appreciate that he let me take this project on. He's now at GeorgeWashington University. And then another collaborator, actuallyanacademic siblingofmine, Richard Souvenir, who's at Temple University. He and I built this starting in 2016, and we've been working on it since. I know Robert. We were introduced at CVPR 2016, in Las Vegas. I was there. I was pregnant with my first child. How does a computer vision academic get into this, rather than counting trees in a forest or that kinds of things? Mystory isastrangeone.Myundergraduate degree is not in computer science. I have an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and geoscience. It's a geology degree. Then I discovered that I thought rockswere reallyboring, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my career. I had taken a remote sensing class that I really liked. So I was looking for jobs straight out of undergrad, and I was lucky enough to land in Robert's lab as a research assistant. At the time, he was funded by IARPA, which is the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. They were Wow! So you are busy with two roles! Which one will we start with? [ laughs ] They go together. It's an appointment that I have as a faculty here at St. Louis University. I got appointed this past year as the inaugural fellow of a new eight institution geospatial institute that is really looking to push the limits on geospatial technology at large. Can you tell us more about it? Absolutely! I work broadly in computer vision and machine learning. But my specific research has focused on global- scale image retrieval or image search. And I've focused particularly on one application, which is combating child sexual abuse by recognizing where victims of child sexual abuse are photographed. I work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children here in the United States. We have an investigative platform for when they are investigating cases of child sexual abuse that, it turns out, are often taken in hotel rooms. They can recognize what hotel it was taken in.