MICCAI 2020 Daily - Wednesday

32 Yenisel Plasencia Calaña the research was high. People publish in very good journals and conferences, like CVPR for example. There is very good work in this institute. The problem is that in the rest of the institutes, it’s very incipient. Those institutes may have another objective, and then they try to use artificial intelligence for some minor things. It’s not focused fully on artificial intelligence. Can you tell us how it was to be a child with a passion for science? It was first because of mathematics, computer science, programming, and so on. Not for research. I did 5 years in computer science. I realized in high school that I liked mathematics, and I liked programming. Then we did some courses on artificial intelligence at the university. I decided that I wanted to continue working on that. At my institute, I realized for the first time that I liked research. I was already 24 years old. It was a requirement to do a PhD for my job position, but I liked it. I realized that I like to discover new things and understand why things happen. What about school when you were much younger? Did you gravitate toward science? Many professors pushed me when they discovered I was good at mathematics, for example, also at physics and chemistry. When I was in secondary school, my teachers realized that I was good at that. They sent me to contests in the provinces and then contests in the whole country. I was competing against kids from all of the provinces. Then I went to a special school for science. It was called the Vocational Institute of Exact Sciences. There, the professors also encouraged me to continue studying these topics that I was good at. That was really helpful. In every stage of school, they encouraged you to fulfill your full potential. Did you grow up in the city or the country? I grew up in a neighborhood, in the most central part of Havana. It’s called Vedado. Should we visit? Yes, it’s really nice to see! Many people stay there for tourism. In each block, you have trees. Every block has a large distance from the houses to the street. I hope one day! One more message to the world? Take into account accessibility in science, accessibility in artificial intelligence, transparent, fair and responsible development of artificial intelligence. People are becomingmore aware about these topics. I encourage people to look more into them. DAILY Wednesday “We are proud of that!”

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