Computer Vision News - May 2022

17 Ana Serrano or the beginning of university either. I did well, I guess, but I wouldn’t say I considered myself brilliant. I persevere. I keep going in one direction if I think this is the correct direction. This paid off in the end. During the last two or three years that I was in college, I started getting to know research. I was interested in research in general. I wasn’t pursuing a particular field, not in computer graphics or computer vision. I was just a regular engineer, let’s say. Then I got in touch with computer graphics and computer vision. I started to realize that I was doing good! I was doing better at research than regular problem-solving. I was very happy that I finally discovered what I wanted to do. It was not clear to me... [ laughs ] I am happy you did! You mentioned perseverance as one of your main strengths. This seems very common among scientists. What talent do you have that most scientists don’t have? Ana, can you tell us about your work? My research spans several areas. In particular, I work on computational imaging, which is the capture part of image perception. It’s about how we see or how we perceive different images or rendered content. Also, in the visualization part, digital reality at the moment. All these things are quite different, but I enjoy doing different things. The one thing in common, which fascinates me the most, is focusing on perception-motivated solutions. I really enjoy creating and applying fundamental knowledge about how the human visual system works and to use all this knowledge to improve different experiences, like virtual reality visualization, capturing devices, and so on. I really enjoy learning how things work and to apply all this to whatever work I’m doing. All these things have one more thing in common, which you did not mention: they are very complicated. [ laughs ] Yes, indeed. They are complicated. Once you get into it, it becomes easier with time. There are people that work on one single thing, and they become experts. I don’t want to say I’m not an expert, but that’s a bit different for me because I like working on a broader set of things. Sometimes I don’t have as much time to devote to a single one. That’s good, I think. I like to apply things I learned in one field to other fields. In the end, that’s also rewarding. It also gives me ideas about how to interact with all these fields. I’m really happy. When did you discover that you had a gift for complicated things?  [ laughs ] Quite late actually. I was never a brilliant student at school, in high school