Computer Vision News - September 2018

I guess it’s because I am doing interdisciplinary research between civil engineering or the construction industry and computer vision. My background is in architecture. I spent many years studying and working as an architect. The reason I turned to AI and computer vision (I knew nothing about it beforehand) is because of issues in my work environment. I was dealing with renovation, at that point, and I needed to understand the building before being able to do any new design. This process, which at that point would usually be done with a tape measure, takes a lot of time. What I wanted to do is to be able to jump into the creative process, having in my hands some information about the existing building. That was hard to do. There should be a better way to do it, and not just go around with a tape measure to try and figure out what is going on in the building. I got introduced into 3D sensors, which was great. Then I understood the issue behind them which is, now what do we do with their output, how to get the information we need out of it. We have to semantically understand it in order to automate the process. Otherwise, we just go back again to a very tedious process of manual modeling. That’s how I started looking into computer vision, about all of these 2D and 3D modalities, how we can automatically extract semantic information out of them by creating algorithms and “teaching” them. That was very exciting for me. It was that problem that stole you from one community into another. Well, I don’t think I was stolen. I work in between the two. Sometimes, I find myself towards one side or the other side. I’m always in between, trying to bridge the two. No matter how much I love artificial intelligence, I will never forget my architectural background. I know that the construction industry has so many problems with being able to introduce technology in a sustainable way. I find myself wanting to help move this industry a step forward. Being able to do that would be awesome. I think I know why you don’t want to forget your roots. Is it because you are Greek? I learned from Nikos Paragios that there is a saying in Greek: “ You should never forget your roots ”. And now you are in the USA… Yes, for my work, I’ve been to different places all over the world. Of course, home is always home. Also, home is Pauline Luc 25 Computer Vision News 色 Iro Armeni Women in Science “I can’t imagine working on anything else!”