21 Linjie Li Computer Vision News Linjie Li is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. Read 100 FASCINATING interviews with Women in Computer Vision You are also a co-author of a paper accepted this year at CVPR. Is that right? We actually have five papers. Five papers? I think five or six. Some of them are from my interns, and there are two papers where I'm the first author. What is the field you're working in? For the last four years of my career, I've been working on vision and language research. Basically, we are training models to understand both vision and language modality inputs together. Is this something that you recommended to Microsoft or something that Microsoft recommended to you? It's a long story! [ laughs ] About five years ago, when I graduated, I was in a PhD program, but I didn't graduate with a PhD degree. I was interning with Tesla and noticed that the industry was doing some research, and there are a lot of interesting and applicable problems. So I chose to quit my PhD around 2018 and had an interview for a position in the industry. Then I actually interviewed as a software engineer first with Microsoft. Basically, the team that gave me the offer suddenly lost their headcount, and I was contacted by my previous manager, who's not at Microsoft now: Jingjing Liu is now a professor at Tsinghua University, a top university in China. She saw my resume and felt like I had a strong background doing some research when I was a student. She decided to take me on as a research engineer. The position of her team was based on vision and language. At the time, it was still a new field. People were either doing computer vision or NLP, right? So, our team was dedicated to five to six researchers working on vision and language-building models that can solve both problems. It's a kind of convergence? Yes, it's a convergence. So there was a little bit of bravery in getting into a new field like this. Yes, and also from my career perspective, I know that there's a chance I probably won't be able to do research again with a master's degree. Those places usually require a PhD. It was lucky that Jingjing found me and offered me a position where I can still do research. So there was a little bit of luck, a little bit of unexpected, and a little bit of courage involved. Yeah. Which one was the most? Maybe courage. [ laughs ] I don't know.
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