ICCV Daily 2019 - Thursday

DAILY Mohammad Jafari 15 Ruth Fong DA I L Y trying to measure the properties of the model, where does the model fail, and stuff like that. I do also quite enjoy the engineering aspect as well. It was the science of interpretability that attracted me in the first place. Probably, at that time, you had already decided to become a scientist. Yes, I had already decided that I would do something in science. At which point? Pretty early on… I always had a science and engineering kind of slant. I built small solar powered race cars for science fairs and stuff. I had done computer science classes. I had a wonderful teacher named Wendy Gall back in New Jersey who just really inspired me in computer science. I thought it would be a nice hobby. It was really in university where I wanted to do something that you could see. Maybe I was impatient. In computer science, you can really see what you’re doing quite quickly, whereas in biology, sometimes you have to wait years before an experiment works out. Did your family in some way help or push you to become a scientist? So both of my parents are biologists. I have two younger siblings. We all are computer scientists. I like to say that they followed me, but one of them says that it was really our teacher that was inspiring, not me. What would you have been if not a scientist? That’s a really good question! I’m not sure. I think I would have considered writing or, faith is really important to me, so maybe some sort of nonprofit, social action, or charity work. You are talking about social action and ethics in AI. Are you aware that you are talking about things that many people disregard because they would cost them money or prevent them from doing what they want? Yes. "It was the science of interpretability that attracted me in the first place."