ICCV Daily 2019 - Friday

That’s very inspiring. Tell me about you. I know you probably don’t like me saying, but how does a young Greek girl become a famous scientist? Oh boy! [laughs] I knew you wouldn’t like that! Forget the word famous . Me being where I am right now is not a step function. It was tiny, tiny steps from like ten years back to today. So let’s start from the ten years back! Oh! [laughs] That was a long, long time ago! This is the interesting part. We want to be inspired and hear how you made it. If I were to make bullet points of what was important for me and what shaped me, it was definitely having a figure, like my advisor. I had two great advisors. I had my advisor back in undergrad, Petros Maragos, who is at NTUA. He was one of the people that gave me the confidence that “you know what, I can actually do this!” Then, of course, Jitendra Malik. Like what we said before, I trusted both Jitendra and Petros. I had full confidence in what what they were advising me to do. When you have great leaders, you also have a great team. For example, in Berkeley… in 2010, I got on a plane from Greece to the US. On my first day at UC Berkeley, I met Bharath Hariharan. He is now faculty at Cornell, one of the most brilliant, wonderful people I’ve ever met. I had the luck to work with this guy and be next to him for six years. Then, of course, more came after that with all of these labmates, this team around you that is wonderful, that you can trust, that you can ask for help, that you can talk to if you have technical difficulties for your paper, or personal, when you’re mad, upset, or depressed because of what’s 6 Women in C. Vision DA I L Y "Me being where I am right now is not a step function." "From my trip to Kigali, Rwanda, where I taught at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences."