Computer Vision News - December 2016

Zoya: It very much enters because teachers are solidifying pathways that may be very far away . I taught math and computer science to different ages ranging from 10 years old up to undergrad and some grad students. When I teach, I don’t try to teach along one pathway. I’ll explain something in maybe five different ways in order to enforce different connections. I also make sure that people with one set of knowledge will understand it, and people with another set of knowledge will also understand it in another way. CVN: Do you see yourself teaching in the future? Zoya: I do. I would really like to. I think part of how to pick my future career will depend on whether or not there is a way that I could teach. I would really like an ability to communicate concepts to a large audience to really make sure that the ideas are connected in interesting ways. I think that I can connect things in interesting ways and give people a higher level of understanding. I start at a higher level and then descend into the details. For many people it’s a very helpful approach. I can give these overviews and I would really like to have a chance to do that. CVN: Why are you so passionate about that? Zoya: I get very excited when I have a connection between ideas that I didn’t have before or that didn’t already exist in the literature. Things that were described maybe didn’t click to me right away or I didn’t quite go along with that explanation. If I am able to connect things in a new way, I have a chance to contribute to this whole field or to a new generation of learners . If it didn’t quite click to me in that particular way, suddenly there is something to contribute. I get excited about that. CVN: What is your current work? Zoya: I work in an interdisciplinary field with a cognitive science professor and a computer science professor. A lot of what I do is in between: I’m interested in human memory and attention and how they can apply to applications. This means where people look and how they process images. Those images could be natural images, but they could also be more cognitively demanding tasks like looking at graphs, data visualization, and charts. I’m interested in knowing how people start the process, how they look at this image and how they integrate it in their head to form some kind of understanding. CVN: Do you want to reproduce this 18 Computer Vision News Women in Computer Vision “ I’m interested in human memory and attention and how they can apply to applications ” Women in Science