Computer Vision News - July 2018

which was a dream at the time. We were kids coming second in the world. Could you believe it? We couldn’t believe it! As I said, we skipped our classes. The year after, when I came back, we had this physical education teacher. She gave me a hard time. She said that I won’t let you pass this course because you haven’t shown up for about a year. She handed me this stack of papers for translation. They were English documents that she just wanted to be translated into Farsi. I was the manual labor that she had. She said: “ Unless you translate these documents, I won’t pass you! ” Anyways, I take these documents home. Days pass, and I think “ This is too much! ” Then I was like, I’ve spent the past few years of my life just sitting in front of a computer and programming. What if there was a program that could do this for me? Then I looked up how to automatically translate English to Farsi, something like that. Then I remember the Wikipedia page was maybe the third hit with machine translation. That’s how I started knowing that natural language processing was a thing. I didn’t know that the field existed. Through that, I got exposed to natural language processing. I got interested in it. Then it turns out that there is this task that is incredibly challenging for a system, but is super easy for a four- or five-year-old kid. I just chose to work on that moving forward. That’s my story of how I got into it. How did it develop over time? It’s kind of funny. I was one of these people who stuck with what I was doing and didn’t let go. There are people who have done a minor in psychology or a major in philosophy and then it turned into computer science. I’ve been doing this forever. I’ve been doing this for many years. Did you ever have any second thoughts? I have been lucky, I would say, that I knew what I wanted to do. At the same time, I know there’s a downside, right? I’ve never dived deep into history or geography or other topics that I know I don’t like, but maybe I should have pursued. [ laughs ] But you don’t like them? Maybe, but I’ve passed generic breadth courses. So what can you tell to all of the PhD students who are having second thoughts about what they are learning? There are two things in life, right? I would say, you either pursue something that you are great at or you pursue something that you are super passionate about. You’re extremely lucky if those two collide. And if they’re useful, that’s even better! That’s another thing. You think, you know, at this point you want to maximize your chances of getting a job in computer science. [ both laugh ] The truth is, there should also be a demand, 16 Tuesday Nasrin Mostafazadeh