Australian Institute of Machine Learning computer vision student Yifan Liu awarded Google Fellowship
A young computer vision scientist on Lot Fourteen has won a prestigious Google Fellowship for her work teaching machines to tell the difference between objects in a photo or video. It’s a skill they’ll need to take over the world.
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Teaching computers to tell the difference between objects in a photo or video will enable s cars, automated industrial processes and shark-spotting drones, says a young researcher on Lot Fourteen who has just been awarded a prestigious Google Fellowship.
Australian Institute of Machine Learning PhD student Yifan Liu is developing a faster, smaller method with higher accuracy for this process, which will be highly sought after.
“The companies will pay us a lot of money for our algorithm,” she said.
“It’s useful and it can change our society in some areas.”
Ms Liu enjoys working in a field of computer science with multiple real-world industrial applications, wherever computers need visual data to understand the physical world.
“To recognise and localise an object in an image is the fundamental task in computer vision,” she said.
“It has a lot of applications in the industry. For example, we hope to set up an automatic grape picking machine in the wine estate. If the machine can automatically identify the location of the grapes and the location of the grape racks, it can work normally.
“Besides, if we want to have a self-driving car, computer vision helps the car to recognise where is the person and where is the car.”
The 27-year-old from “a small town, Cangzhou, Hebei, an hour from Beijing in China” has a 3-year scholarship at the Institute, which is part of the University of Adelaide.
Now she also has the 2020 Google PhD Fellowship, which was created “to recognise and support outstanding graduate students who seek to influence the future of technology by pursuing exceptional research in computer science and related fields”.
The scholarship rewards her with $15,000 as well as access to a research mentor, Dr Alireza Fathi, a senior research scientist in the Google Research Machine Perception team. His main area of focus is on 3D scene understanding.
“We have talked to each other several times, he’s very creative,” Ms Liu said.
“The Google PhD Fellowship is a very good experience because it will bring a lot of attention to my work and maybe this will help me become a more famous researcher.”