with a lot of colleagues. I believe this is important – not for me, but for the next generation because this technology is so important in the world. It should be important in Italy, and now the investment is also coming in Italy, and this is, I believe, one of the things I’m more proud of. After we wrote the strategy two years ago, we now have an enormous project for Italy that is more than €100m, called Future AI Research (FAIR). That takes together most of the universities in Italy. It’s paid with the Next Generation Europe money, so it’s not bad. It’s only for foundational AI research. The other role is international because I think that to do something good in Italy, I need to know what everyone is doing around the world. Modena is now one of the units of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). That is an association of more than 40 units in Europe and hundreds of people. Also, I’m working a lot in the computer vision community. This year, I’m happy because I will be the General Chair of CVPR. I was General Chair of ECCV 2022 in Tel Aviv and Program Chair of ICCV in Venice in 2017. Our magazine is very proud to have accompanied you in all these roles. It’s true, and thanks a lot for that. Tell us more about the work you are doing. The secret of my work is that I don’t do anything! [she laughs] No, no, I like delegating to people what they would like to do. I ask the students and the researchers with me to read a lot, to know a lot, and to have the creativity to invent something new. This is for research, but in my university, we also do a lot of applied research, especially because in Italy, we don’t have a lot of government funds. Most of the money we have comes from companies: mechanical companies that we have around, technological companies, international ones. I need people working with me to think about new research ideas and how to apply them in the practical world. I study a lot. I try going around this conference to pick up some new ideas. Are conferences a place where you pick up ideas? I’m working mainly in computer vision. Even now, computer vision is a part of the big game of AI. In the last few years, I’ve been working more on language and vision together, and also language and generative AI. I think the communities that try to do all things together are very interesting. For my tradition, I come to CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, WACV, and so on. Also, the old ICPR, for me, is my story, so this is important. But also the other conferences, like NeurIPS or AAAI, are important because now everything is mixed in our technologies. 15 DAILY WACV Sunday Rita Cucchiara
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc3NzU=