ECCV 2016 Daily - Wednesday

ECCV Daily: Zeynep, what is your position? Zeynep Akata: I am doing a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics . ECCV Daily: Where are you originally from? Zeynep: I am Turkish from Istanbul. ECCV Daily: What is the project you are working on now? Zeynep: In general, my research interests have been image classification. When you don’t have enough training data for some of the classes, we are still doing classification using some form of sight information, for example, different object properties help us or sentences that we write about objects help us. After having sentences that are very descriptive and detailed, we have also decided to use them to generate images from scratch. I worked on image generation. There are other ways of conditioning the generated models. Apart from the text, we can also use locations or object key points, for example. This helps us to build larger images that are visibly high quality. With Lisa Anne Hendricks we were working on the opposite problem, generating sentences using images that Lisa is going to talk about. ECCV Daily: How did you decide to become a scientist? What happened, as a young girl, that motivated you to pursue science? Zeynep: I was interested in math, but not physics. My father is a mechanical engineer, and he wanted me to become a mechanical engineer. Because I was interested in physics, I said I would do computer science. I made the decision right before exams for university around the age of 18. ECCV Daily: Before you decided to study computer science, did you feel gifted in technology? Zeynep: No, I didn’t. I grew up as a normal kid without any special interests. I was doing well in all of my courses. For example, I liked reading and drawing a lot. I chose computer science partially because I could find a job easily afterwards. ECCV Daily: What were your dreams when you were a kid? Zeynep Akata 10 ECCV Daily: Wednesday Women in Computer Vision