ICCV Daily 2021 - Friday

Yulia Gryaditskaya is a Senior Research Fellow at the SketchX group, led by Yi-Zhe Song, at the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) in Surrey, United Kingdom. More than 100 inspiring interviews with successful Women in Computer Vision in our archive Yulia, tell us about your work! I work at SketchX now. I started looking into sketching when I was doing my first postdoc in Inria, France, working with concept sketches. These are the kind of sketches that industrial designers do. I studied how designers draw and work on sketch-based modeling, lifting 2D sketches to 3D. We still work on that. I work in the SketchX group, which is a vision group. They work on a range of tasks related to sketch understanding primarily as well as sketch generation and sketch retrieval. In this group, I lead the 3D direction. For instance, we work on VR sketching, which is sketching in 3D. With the students, we also work on sketch-based modeling using deep learning, sketch generation and sketch segmentation. How does a young, talented girl fall in love with sketches? What attracted you to this field? It’s a personal interest [ laughs ]. It’s a good question and not so easy to answer. I do drawing, and I studied drawing and sketching quite a bit. I considered that as a potential profession long ago. That’s why I did this postdoc. Adrien Bousseau from Inria saw that I do drawing and sketching, and he asked if it is something that I’d be interested in working on. That’s when I started working with sketches. My background in sketching helps me understand diverse sketching techniques, workflows and what kind of tools there might be needed. What do sketches contribute to humankind? It’s very relevant. There are two directions. Sketching is the first step of content creation. So, for example, sketching is the first step of designing something. Before you design a teapot, you need to sketch it first. Also, sketching is generally a very expressive and communicative tool. It’s pleasant to draw. The second part of my research is about creativity; how sketching can be used to boost creativity. 20 DAILY ICCV Friday Women in Computer Vision