CVPR Daily - Tuesday

22 / 30

During your keynote, you discussed
the relation between Research,
Product and Business - and how these
3 elements should perfectly interact in
order to have success in the
marketplace. In your opinion, in our
industry, which of these are working
well together and which are not?
That is a great question! The product
has a key role in the connection
between those things. We mostly are
trained as technologists. We actually
are good at developing technologies.
Most of us don’t have that opportunity
to get our hands dirty and deploy
things into the wild or to learn what
products are really doing.
To me, the most challenging thing is
actually thinking about a product form
that people actually care about. You
asked me about these three elements.
Everything is difficult. If you ask a
business person, they will say
technology is hard. For technologists,
business is hard. The product is where
you connect those things. The
researchers need to push further to
get out of their comfort zone. If you
care about your product, business
people can’t just talk about the
business model they need or what kind
of products they should have built to
get to the market. To me, this is where
it’s most interesting and exciting
talking about the entire cycle.
You were talking about the idea of
curiosity. It was clear that one of the
things that drives your passion in this
field is your curiosity for the potential
of what can be achieved. How do you
nurture curiosity in people, and how
do you nurture curiosity in
corporations?
A significant part of what makes us, as
human beings, so unique in the
universe, is our curiosity. Think about
why we invented so many things.
Many of those things come out of
curiosity. How did people create the
wheel? Why did people create the
printing press? Now we know why
people do things in AI or computer
vision. I think a lot of that is because of
curiosity.
I do agree with you that curiosity
needs to be nurtured. This should start
from a very young age, within your
family, then when you go to school,
and onto university. When you work in
a company, in a place like Microsoft
Research, I think we are very
fortunate. We have a lot of people that
“ A significant part of
what makes us, as human
beings, so unique in the
universe, is our curiosity”
Harry Shum
22
Harry Shum is Executive Vice
President, Artificial Intelligence and
Research Group, Microsoft.