Brains that remain There is a war on talent raging within the field of AI, with young researchers being lured away by big tech companies. Yet there are also talents who consciously choose an academic career. Two professors and two rising stars talk about their work. Text: Ans Hekkenberg
LEADING BY EXAMPLE Cees Snoek is Professor of Intelligent Sensory Information Systems and Pascal Mettes is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Computer Science, both at the University of Amsterdam. BOB BRONSHOFF
Cees Snoek
What are you working on? Pascal Mettes: ‘We ensure that artificial intelligence is able to recognise objects and behaviour in videos. What or whom do you see in the video, with what object, what are they doing?’ Cees Snoek: ‘If AI can interpret videos correctly, there are all kinds of applications that can be imagined. For example, AI can assess medical scans. But you can also think of cameras at Schiphol that monitor what happens to your suitcase. And we are working with TomTom, for example. There are TomTom cars driving around capturing the area. With those images, we create advanced maps for self-driving vehicles.’
What makes this field challenging? Pascal Mettes
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CS: ‘AI works on the basis of machine learning. If you show a learning system what a tree looks like a hundred times, the software can learn to recognise trees. We try to encapsulate that learning process in algorithms.’ PM: ‘The old strategy was to impose rules on a system. Suppose you have a camera system in a nursing home that monitors if
