This is incredibly serious stuff, but Fidler is not without a sense of humour. Other research supports Nvidia’s autonomous vehicle technologies that are wrapped into the company’s ongoing collaboration with Mercedes-Benz AG. Her team’s work in Toronto has given creative types the superpowers to instantly generate entire 2D and 3D scenes - a mountain lake shrouded in fog, a woman beneath a vast Prairie sky or any other visual that comes to mind - simply by prompting the AI with text.

The little girl who hated math grew up to be a brilliant University of Toronto professor and an international star in the computer-vision and machine-learning world. And that’s just the tip of the AI iceberg, where Fidler today ranks among the premier boundary pushers as the head of Nvidia Corp.‘s research lab in Toronto. It can read X-rays, monitor crops, pilot driverless cars, check out groceries, vacuum floors, recognize faces, keep watch on professional athletes for the analytics gang and generate immersive video-game environments.

“The fact that you could have something in mathematical form, but then see the results, something that human eyes could understand, and can get excited about, that just felt really nice to me.”Ĭomputer vision has come a long way since Fidler’s transformative moment as an undergrad. The young, Slovenian math nerd was mesmerized by the prospects of such technology, so much so that by the time the talk ended, Fidler knew she had found her calling. This was the early days of artificial-intelligence research, when the field was confined to the far reaches of computer science departments at universities and the outer boroughs of geekdom.Įarly computer-vision pioneers took visual problems and translated them into math to solve. That is what Fidler was doing at the University of Ljubljana, circa 2000, when she attended a talk by a visiting professor on computer vision. Other beachgoers lounged on towels and presumably buried their noses in novels, but the self-described math “nerd” solved nerdy math problems, and made a declaration at the grand old age of 12 that she would be studying the subject at university. The girl who hated math became someone who began bringing her math books on family beach holidays. Sanja Fidler, as a child, beside her younger sister who she dressed up as a robot for the Slovenian version of Halloween, a costume foreshadowing the career in AI to come. “Those riddles really got a hold of me,” Fidler said.

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