Computer Vision News - July 2019

34 DAILY CVPR Tuesday Women in Comp. Vision back to Germany. Doing something more is, for me, something that I have to do. I will hopefully do it at some point. I’m sure that you will. When did you discover that you had a passion for science? It was quite easy. My father is an electrical engineer. He repairs, well repaired, actually he is going to retire this year. Sometimes he would bring the medical devices home and continue working. At home, we are three women: my sister, me, and my mother. He sometimes needed one of us to help measure. Sometimes two hands are not enough. He often asked me and my sister as well. I was the one who wanted to do it. He always explained to me how the whole machine works, which are the sensors, how do they measure the sugar in the blood. I knew since I was in fourth or fifth grade that I would study electrical engineering and then computer science. So you have one sister and your mom. Who is the most scientific of the three? Me. What would you have done if you were not a scientist? Honestly, I don’t know. It was so clear. I was really good at math and physics. I was bad at languages basically. It was very obvious. My sister wanted to study medicine, but then there were discussions in the family about what is the benefit of it or not. Then she decided also to do electrical engineering. So if we need a medical doctor, we need to go to another family, not to yours. Definitely… It’s funny. In Germany, my passport says doctor. On an airplane, they say, “ Ah, a doctor. ” I’m not a doctor. I cannot help you if something goes wrong on an airplane. This actually happened once. On the airplane, someone didn’t feel well. It was a long flight overseas. Then they said, “ Can all the doctors please come to the stewardess? ” It says so officially, but I am not! [ both laugh ] Regarding the move to BMW, did it come by chance? It came by chance. I was doing my PhD in the area of safety platforms for future autonomous systems. I knew I wanted to bring what I had done in my PhD to a real product. In a PhD, you do a prototype. It works in some cases. In a conference, people present what works or doesn’t work. I wanted to do