19 Computer Vision News Computer Vision News Aasa Feragen is a Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. Aasa, people know you have spent most of your professional career between Finland and Denmark, but you are actually Norwegian. Yes, I’m from Norway, which is why when I pronounce my name, I sound completely different. What is your work about? My education is in mathematics. When I started working – can I tell the long story? We love long stories. [laughs] I always thought I would do research in mathematics, but then when I finished my PhD, the financial crisis had just hit the job market, and, especially as a theoretical mathematician, there were no jobs to get. I found a three-month postdoc doing medical image analysis at a group in Copenhagen – I think it was three months because they considered me high-risk, and they wanted to figure out what sort of a person I was. It was also with the goal of applying for more funding so I could stay. That worked out. I got funding, I got to stay as a postdoc, and this is how I started working with medical image analysis. In the beginning, my work was very mathematical, very geometrical, but through the years, I have become better at maybe the more engineering and technical parts. Today, I work also sometimes with very applied and clinical – well, maybe this community would not call it clinical, but from where I’m coming from, it’s very applied and very clinical, where we also start looking at how do our algorithms interact with clinicians and with patients and so on. There’s the mathematical end of the spectrum, where we think about how do we even formulate the technical problems that we’re trying to solve. We formulate them in terms of math, and then we use computers to solve those mathematical problems, and that gives us an algorithm. But then I also work on the other end, where we start thinking about how this affects other people. No more geometry? Well, it’s not completely gone, but at the moment, I’m not doing so much geometry, unfortunately. I very much enjoy it, but it just doesn’t come naturally at the moment. I am very much disappointed - you are not as high risk as they thought that you were. You finally blended pretty well into the new field! I’m not sure. That sounds really depressing. [we laugh] Now you’re calling me boring! [Aasa laughs] Let’s get out of the boring part! What Aasa Feragen
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