ECCV 2020 Daily - Wednesday

3 Alyssa Pierson 27 DAILY W e d n e s d a y Did that ever happen to you? Not with our autonomous vehicles, because, you know, that would be a pretty big deal. But when I worked with smaller ground research platforms. If you had a little sister that wanted to enter the field of robotics, would you tell her to do it or would you advise her to stay away? [ laughs ] Oh! I think everyone should study robotics! I would certainly encourage anyone who is interested in robotics to join the field. There are so many open questions and somany things that we have to think about and yet to solve and so many different applications for robotics that I think the more, the merrier. You work in a very high-tech environment, in one of the best labs worldwide. Everybody knows MIT CSAIL. Did you expect to achieve that kind of success and work in such a good lab when you were a young student? I am very fortunate to have this opportunity to work at MIT, and it is something that is an opportunity that I’ve dreamed about. But I don't think I ever set out as a young kid with the goal to work in any particular field or lab. Throughout most of my career, I've sort of followed the interesting problems and followed the interesting opportunities and fortunately, that's led me to where I am today. When you were a kid, what did you want to be? When I was really young, I actually wanted to be a cartoonist. So, not robotics! [laughs] And one of my favorite cartoons was Gary Larson's The Far Side. I found out that Gary Larson, before he was a cartoonist, was a biologist. That inspired me to get into the sciences, get into biology. From there, I studied biology, then engineering, and robotics came up later after my undergraduate studies, and that's how I ended up here. [ laughs ] I guess the comics world lost a great cartoonist! That's probably for the best. Were you good at drawing? I was good enough, but I’m a better roboticist than I am a cartoonist. [laughs] There are scientific cartoonists who are very successful. Yeah, I really enjoy PhD comics, actually. They are very, very funny. What makes them funny situations which are true and maybe a little bit exaggerated, but still, scientists can relate. Yeah, definitely. “Not many people go to robotics via pigeons, but that is the particular path of mine.”