All Quotes

"That philosophy very much guided me to start thinking what are the things that would equip me better for a more senior role further down the path"

"Well, that’s a different story. When I moved to Penn there was nothing, and so I had to build everything from scratch. My first master student, Adam Snyder, was an electrical engineer, and he and I built the digitizer, because we had to buy these analog cameras – camera, one camera – and then build a digitizer. And then I got some NSF initial grants that allowed me to buy a raster display so that we can visualize. The department had PDP-11, so I was working on that computer, and, as I said, it had just a very small memory, and so we were swapping things back and forth. I started to work on – I basically wanted to continue my Ph.D. work, and one of the first things that I started to look at was texture gradient and how can you interpret the three-dimensional information from the two-dimensional projection of the texture gradient. So that was the first Ph.D. with Larry Lieberman, right, was my first Ph.D. student, who then went to IBM research and worked on – had a group in robotics, because I was always interested in the three-dimensional interpretation of the visual information from the very beginning, and I always was interested in vision for, not just vision per se but what is vision for. I thought that it was a good way of testing your algorithms, if you can find the interpretation where you are or can you grasp things or move around? I mean, the robotics gives you a very good testing of your sensory processing, so that’s what I focused on. And then I think it was maybe ’73 or ’74 a man by name Britton Chance, who just passed away yesterday, 97 years old, who was a very prominent biophysicist, he invited me to look at some of these X-ray images from rat brains, because they were really interested in automating the image processing of these medical images. So he brought me into this group, and I found it very interesting, and so that started my career in medical image processing. I worked with him or for him for about six months, but then he was a very strong personality and my joke was you worked for him or you didn’t, and so I quit because I didn’t want to work for him. But then I continued with other people in the medical school at Penn on medical image processing, and I did some nice work there."

"Well, the first robotics system was when I got money to purchase a PUMA robot, which was one of the first robots available for academic labs. And around ’76, ’77, I started to connect the manipulation with the camera work, and grasping was one of the – and of course in those days they had only two-finger grasping, so I initiated with the Penn mechanical-engineering department to design a three-fingered robot, and so we were very much ahead of time in this regard. Around that time I also connected with a French laboratory in Toulouse, which had a rubber sensitive pressure sensor, and as part of the collaboration they made me what we called a “French finger,” which had sensors, so we were able to do this kind of a tactile connection. And so one of my first Ph.D. students – well, he wasn’t my first, but I don’t know, third or so. I think it was third or fourth. Peter Allen, who’s a professor now in Columbia University, he did the first work of this interaction of tactile and visual information, and so that was that."

"With the three-fingered hand? This was – well, I forget the name of the professor in the mechanical-engineering department. He passed away too. I kind of outlive all of my collaborators, but I think the student who designed it was Abramson, if I remember, three-fingered hand with a palm, and then we put some tactile pressure sensors on that, so that allow us to find where you are connecting. And actually, Ken Goldberg, who is here a professor, did his master degree with me on using these tactile sensors for recognition purposes. So, I also during that time connected with psychologists, who were prominent in this tactile perception. One of them was Susan Letterman, who is an outstanding professor-scientist in tactile perception at Queens University in Canada. And then she connected me with another professor, Roberta Klatzky, who is a professor at CMU in the psychology department, and we had a very fruitful collaboration. I learned quite a bit from these two people on how people perceive that – for example, people have certain procedures, motoric procedures when they want to find out how hard something is or what is the surface texture, and so there are these modules that people – procedures that people use for exploring. They called it “exploratory procedures.”"

"If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company."

"This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole"

"“I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies."

"Fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on"

"In order to be adaptable, an organism must be suboptimal."

"This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the computational material that forms the underpinnings of the currently evolving set of brain models. It is now clear that the brain is unlikely to be understood without recourse to computational theories. The theme of An Introduction to Natural Computation is that ideas from diverse areas such as neuroscience, information theory, and optimization theory have recently been extended in ways that make them useful for describing the brains programs. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the computational material that forms the underpinnings of the currently evolving set of brain models. It stresses the broad spectrum of learning models--ranging from neural network learning through reinforcement learning to genetic learning--and situates the various models in their appropriate neural context."

"To write about models of the brain before the brain is fully understood is a delicate matter. Very detailed models of the neural circuitry risk losing track of the task the brain is trying to solve. At the other extreme, models that represent cognitive constructs can be so abstract that they lose all relationship to neurobiology. An Introduction to Natural Computation takes the middle ground and stresses the computational task while staying near the neurobiology."

"My main research interest is in computational theories of the brain with emphasis on human vision and motor control. In 1985 Chris Brown and I led a team that designed and built a high speed binocular camera control system capable of simulating human eye movements. The system was mounted on a robotic arm that allowed it to move at one meter per second in a two meter radius workspace. This system has led to an increased understanding of the role of behavior in vision, in particular that visual computations can be simpler when interacting in the 3D world. To pursue this avenue we became interested in pursuing this research by using high DOF models of humans' natural behavior in virtual reality environments. To be able to monitor human eye movements in these enviroments, with Mary Hayhoe and Jeff Pelz we build the first head montor that ecorporated a eye tracker inside the HMD. My PhD research focused on biomedical image processing but as an assistant professor I became more interested on the general problem of modeling vision and collaborated with my University of Rochester colleague Chris Brown to write the first text in computer vision in 1982, which is still accessible on the web. In the middle 80s the field discovered biologically motivated active vision could be much more efficient than static picture analysis. Chris and I built the first real-time binocular robot that could make saccades and pursue moving targets. The robot was enormously influential in showing that motion actually made many of the vision computations simpler by providing efference copy information. As a result, my interests progressed to the human brain realized vision. Through Rochester's Bridging program to learn tract tracing in visual cortex in cats and rats in the department of Anatomy and Physiology. I became hooked on the brain, but realized my talents were in mathematical modelingThat experience has led to a lifelong interest in neural mode . A brilliant student, Raj Rao was able to define a predictive coding model that showed that neural systems spanning cortical maps could be seen as pivotal in learning memory representations 1. That model has been enormously successful, but a frustration for me has been that it was cast at a level above spikes. Working with a postdoc, Janneke Jehee, we put together a spiking model, which exhibited several desirable properties, but had unsolved problems. Most recently I have resolved these problems with another star student Ruohan Zhang. We realized that we are at the stage that the elements of the spiking model could be tested. In that process, I have been extraordinarily fortunate in starting a collaboration with Luc Genet who is a leader in cell patch clamp technology, particularly in the two-cell patches we will need for next step. We have been collaborating for the two years and our joint efforts are extremely promising. This effort dovetails with a second interest in How the brain represents movement. Our newest papers show that humans use common postures in whole body tasks and that these are local energy minima, suggesting new constraints for motor cortex. 1."

"There is some crazy pressure on women, and on men, to almost be superwoman or superman, and that's just not realistic"

"The advice to everyone is, you can have it all, but don't expect to have it at exactly the same time"

"Your career is going to be measured in decades, and you'll probably have many careers in your life, so make sure that you really enjoy each period of your life and make the most of it"

"Don't try and achieve everything at the same time and put so much pressure on yourself"

"That was a game-changing piece of advice for me, because then I started doing completely different jobs and ones that weren't necessarily logical to most people's thinking"

"We've been in the midsts of a health crisis, and if we didn't put our people's health and safety first and understand what's going on in their lives, honestly, I think we would have done a very poor job managing the bank through the crisis"

"Our employees have then rewarded us incredibly because, secure in that and knowing that they were going to be okay, then meant that they would focus on our clients and look after them too"

"We will invest in our infrastructure, risk management and controls to ensure that we operate in a safe and sound manner and serve our clients and customers with excellence"

"I knew it was going to be multiple years and I knew I had to get a move on: to be bold around it and take tough decisions that hadn’t been made before, and to make investments that were going to be hard for the bottom line for a couple of years but would then bear fruit"

"Having experience of different parts of the bank gives you a lot of courage and conviction, to get clarity quickly about what needs to be done and stick to the plan, even if it’s difficult"

"Our folk here are not shy about telling you what you need to do when you ask them"

"We are not done and we’ve still got a way to go. There is no victory being declared, but there is very clear, demonstrable progress"

"There was a lot of pride in some of these retail businesses and it has been hard to let go of them from a cultural point of view"

"We’ve taken some pretty tough talent calls, says Fraser. If someone was a strong performer, but their job had gone away in the reorg, we would put them into a job that someone else had"

"We are using the strength of our global platform, and what we do in Services and other areas, to propel the relationship into the boardroom"

"That’s expensive and thankless work until it’s done, and then it’s joyful"

"If you move from 20 different ways of doing something to one, that reduces the risk of something going wrong enormously. Then you make sure that the process around that makes sense, end to end: making sure it isn’t convoluted and complex. You put in all your controls, both preventive, and detective. You try and make as many of them automated as possible, and then you test them constantly to make sure they’re working. That is the deeply unsexy but very important work we have been doing"

"There are a lot more things coming off the to-do list than getting added to it. We can see it delivering better outcomes and starting to improve efficiency. There’s been a huge lift done, but now we’re in the phase when you’re starting to get things closed"

"I am looking back, trying to reflect upon my accomplishments, as well as the professional experiences and insights that I gained over the years as a: (1) chemistry teacher, (2) regional consultant for chemistry teachers, (3) deputy of the chief chemistry teachers' superintendent, (4) head of the National Center for Chemistry Teachers, and (5) researcher."

"I was a high-school chemistry teacher for 26 years, immediately after finishing my military reserves service in the framework of academia."

"From day one, we get called nepo-kid and born with a silver spoon and papa ki pari. We are second generation. But what people don’t understand is, when I joined Emcure, were 500 crores, we are 8000 crores now. To take it to that level as a group, the second and third generation also needs to have entrepreneurial mindset. In India, 87% of our GDP is from family owned businesses. We are the third largest country, when it comes to just family businesses. While founders are fabulous, family businesses also have a very important place. The 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation also have a very important role. Sometimes, people don’t think through that. It’s just their ignorance, you just can’t help it. You have to do the best you can given the base you have been given and try your best to take it to the next level. We as a family have done a fabulous job"

"Perimenopause is full of mood swings, and what can be better to lift your mood and fitness than dancing with a dear friend?! My kids are named Vir and Jay after Sholay (A Bollywood classic that released in 1975) – so you can only imagine my love for Bollywood. So, I mix in Bollywood dance with my gym, yoga and Pilates to ensure I’m never bored and always motivated to move and keep that attitude of 'I’m 48, I’m going to be selfish and take care of myself, to h""" with the world, you do you girl'"

"Parenting is about being available for your kids, not just physically but emotionally too. Adolescence is a wake-up call for all of us"

"My mom got worried, made me take singing classes, kathak classes, walk with a book on my head in an attempt to make me more ‘feminine’… perfectly sweet soul, perfectly good intent but it left scars"

"Bottomline, 2 good parents, great intent but their actions led to years of low self esteem"

"Detach. Stop trying to fix things you feel they lack or could do better at... But over communicate … over communicate … over communicate how proud you are of them and how you are always there for them… the ‘I’m proud of you’ part being most important"

"Confidence is the best gift you can give your child. The minute you see signs of low confidence, course correct, get professional help"

"If we choose to bring a child in this world, let’s ensure we give them TIME… that we have work life balance to catch these signs early and course correct. Say NO to 70 hour weeks or if you want that life say NO to being a parent"

"There were nine grand children in the house during summer vacations and the results would be declared during that time, eight of them would have ranked first and I ranked second which was fantastic but no one congratulated me"

"The atmosphere in the house was like someone's died then the whole house would like go into mourning"

"The goal of sharing my personal stories is to demonstrate how all of us are flawed and need to find the inner strength to love ourselves and be forgiving to ourselves as we continue slipping and failing"

"The first time I liked myself and felt good about myself was at 21 when I became a chartered accountant. For 21 years I did not like myself"

"You can juggle motherhood while running a business and be great at both"

"Happy mind and a healthy body is all the wealth you need"

"During my graduation days in Delhi, I came across several who wanted to lose weight and look beautiful. This made me realize that there is a market for my business proposition"

"My mother’s dedication towards her family and her work ethics have shaped my entire life"

"Just decide who you are going to be and pursue your dream against all odds"

"I don’t believe in preaching ideologies. I believe in work. Let your work speak for what you believe in what you commit to"