CVPR Daily - Tuesday

but that's something we are constantly working on. That's when you’ll earn your Nobel Prize, maybe? [ Laughs ] No, I wouldn't say that! Well, you have started winning other important prizes, so who knows? Do you see your career as a researcher mainly in America or do you see yourself one day in Europe or back in the Far East? At this point, I don't know. Research oftentimes is very international. In academics, there are really not a lot of boundaries. Where I'm located physically isn’t that important, but the US is great. Are you able to sacrifice the place where you want to live for a place where your career will advance? Right now I'm really happy with Columbia and New York City. It’s a very nice school and city to be in. If you had an offer in a country where there is no Chinese food at all, would you take it? Probably not. [ laughs ] Have you ever felt a moment during your studies when you wanted to quit? Yeah, I think there are definitely lots of times like that. Doing research, by definition, is doing something that people have not done before. And as a result, oftentimes we don't know whether it's even possible or whether the problem formulation is reasonable, or whether it's too hard. Especially in this day and age of using machine learning, oftentimes we are doing things that we feel are almost impossible. With the power of data and machine learning, it actually is possible or possible to extend. I constantly ask myself whether it is a problem that's too hard, if we should change direction, or if we didn't try hard enough. What is your ultimate goal? My ultimate goal is to have robots working in our homes. It might sound simple, but it is such a hard problem since our home is so unstructured. It has all the random objects and all the random configurations, and therefore, it really needs a very robust perception and planning algorithm. The longer I work on it, the more I feel like, is that even possible? But I feel that will be really nice. That's my vision. What chances do you give yourself for achieving that goal one day? A chance of me achieving it? It doesn't really matter whether I achieve it or the field together achieves it. It's very hard to put a number on it. It's very unlikely to be one person achieving it. It's always a team. When you're solving this kind of grand problem, it's even bigger. Read more than 100 interviews with Women in Computer Vision! 27 DAILY CVPR Tuesday Shuran Song