Month: February 2018

CVC PhD student Dena Bazazian is one of the organisers of the WiCV Workshop at 2018’s CVPR Conference, which will take place at Salt Lake City this summer with over 4000 expected attendees in one of the biggest Computer Vision gatherings in the world.

Putting the focus of Women in Tech is the main aim of the WiCV Workshop in order to foster and promote women’s work within the Tech industry. This year’s meeting is organised by the aforementioned Dena Bazazian (CVC), Dr. Adriana Romero (Facebook), Dr. Ilke Demir (Facebook), Dr. Viktoriia Sharmanska (Imperial College London), and Lyne P. Tchapmi (Stanford).

According to the organisers, the goal of the Workshop are to “raise visibility of female computer vision researchers by presenting invited research talks by women who are role models in this field.” To “give opportunities to junior female students or researchers to present their work via a poster session and travel awards” and, finally, to “share experience and career advice for female students and professionals”.

“I believe an event such as WiCV will act as a strong motivator for all the women in computer vision, especially young researchers who are taking their first steps in a field mostly populated by men. Therefore, I greatly believe in what WiCV stands for and the benefits it brings at every edition: raising every year the self-reliance of women working in computer vision and helping to include each other in a broader community is an aspect of primary importance and can be achieved only by sharing career advices and encouraging each other as female researchers. A workshop like WiCV is the perfect venue to spread this kind of attitude, rising at the same time awareness in the whole scientific community,” Dena explains.

Dena Bazazian is a PhD student at CVC since 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Center) and Dr. Andrew Bagdanov (Florence University). She is working on text localization and recognition in unconstrained conditions. Her research focuses on the combination of visual and textual data to mutually improve text extraction and scene understanding.

The call for papers is currently open until the 23^rd of March. Dena and her colleagues expect a high attendance and paper rate and hope these type of actions help close the gap in female representation within Computer Vision and Tech in general.

Marie Curie, Hypatia of Alexandria and Rosalind Franklin are probably some of the few names that sound familiar when talking about women in science. Unfortunately, not many more names stand out and neither do their contributions to science and, of course, society.

Throughout history, there have been many brilliant women in science whose work has been unrecognized. Being a female scientist in the past was an almost impossible task: gender gaps, difficult access to education and stereotypes were important barriers that hindered women from participating in this discipline. In addition, those few who managed to carve a niche in this world, saw how their work was hidden, neglected or forgotten.

Nowadays, although there are many more opportunities, women and girls continue to be excluded from participating in science. In fact, according to the report Científicas en Cifras 2015, 39% of the research staff in Spain are women, whereas the average in Europe is 33%. Even though this percentage may seem optimistic beforehand, the role of these women is still quite critical in science and technology communities, since stereotypes are still in force and therefore, female presence is disproportionately low in other aspects such as in positions of responsibility or in award nominations.

To show the importance of women in science and the significant contributions they have made, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science is celebrated every February 11^th. This day was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly to promote full and equal access to and participation in science for women and to stimulate scientific vocations in girls.

From the Computer Vision Center we wanted to celebrate this special day by giving voice to our female researchers. According to the report mentioned above, there are also inequalities between the different fields of science and it is precisely in the technological fields in which there is a lower female presence, with a mean of 18% of research staff. Our female researchers have a lot to say and a lot to contribute, discovering what was the reason that led them to dedicate themselves to science:

#WomeninScienceDay