Computer Vision News - August 2017

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Amanda Song is a third year PhD
student working at UCSD (University of
California, San Diego). Her home
department is cognitive science and her
research topic lies in the intersection of
computer vision, machine learning, and
social science.
Amanda, can you tell us about your
work?
I would define my work as
computational social psychology which
means I use machine learning
technologies to study people's
cognition and social cognition.
How did you decide to work in a field
like this? What fascinates you about it?
There are a lot of interesting, random
factors that led me to where I am.
Initially, I started as a biology student.
My first approach to science was about
neuroscience and visual science. I
studied the brain system, and how the
visual cortex works at a single neural
level. I dealt with animal experiment
and single-unit recording. Later, I
studied machine learning because I felt
that the computational and machine
learning model might help me have a
better description and representation
of what the human brain is doing.
That’s what I studied in the University
of California San Diego’s Cognitive
Science Department. This department
gives you a lot of freedom to do all
sorts of research. You can take different
approaches and combine them
together in a creative way.
What kind of animals did you work
with?
Cats and monkeys.
When you worked with animals, what
did you find different and similar?
Which of their features helped you
understand the human brain?
At a single neuro level, I think that
animals and humans share similar
regional functions. For example, the
primary visual cortex acts as the edge
and contour detector. So in this aspect,
it’s very similar. The most distinct
difference might be at higher level
cognition such as language and logical
reasoning. This is very different because
a lot of human complex social behavior
is based on our logical thinking and on
our language to communicate our
thoughts. I can’t study that in animals
easily.
You look at fields like language, vision,
cognition, and so on. Science has taken
a long time to try and understand how
these things work together. What
would you like to achieve? Do you think
you can understand how the human
brain functions at a higher level?
Well, that’s a very big question. For me,
the higher level question that I care
about is to have a diverse, and yet complete
Women in Science
30 Amanda Song