MICCAI 2021 Daily – Wednesday

Celia Cintas is a Research Scientist at the IBM Research Lab in Nairobi, Kenya. More than 100 inspiring interviews with successful Women in Science in our archive Celia, what is your work about? Currently, we are working on two aspects. First, how to enhance machine learning methods for global health in developing countries. On the other hand, more AI-related, we are working on anomaly pattern detection in neural network activations with a lot of image and computer vision applications. Do you have to be in Nairobi to do this? Of course! Nairobi is becoming a technology hub in this continent. How did you get to this point in your career? How far back are we going? [ laughs ] As far back as we should! When I was seven years old my brother reassembled and recycled an old computer. He taught me to start programming when I was a kid. After that, I have always worked in that area. When I got to college, I was like, “ Wait, can I get paid for coding? Is this possible? ” It was always associated with games! I went to college: everything in computer science, bachelor’s and PhD also, in Argentina. During my PhD at Universidad del Sur in Bahía Blanca, Buenos Aires, I spent six months at University College of London, working with genetics and statistics. When I got back, I had a postdoc as a travelling researcher at Jaén University in Spain. We did some computer vision related stuff for cultural heritage. After that, when I was coming back home, I got an email from Aisha Walcott-Bryant, a head manager of healthcare here in Nairobi. She invited me to have a chat about work that I was doing on healthcare in Latin America and how that could be applied in work here at the IBM lab. That is how I came here. I spent one or two years in the healthcare team, and now I am part of the AI science team. 24 DAILY MICCAI Wednesday Women in Science “ Wait, can I get paid for coding? Is this possible? ”