Profile
Alessandra Mileo
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About Me:
I am Italian. I am a proud mum. Ah, and I would have probably been a rock singer if I didn’t become a scientist 🙂
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I am originally from Italy, but in Ireland long enough (14 years now!) to feel very much at home. I lived in Galway for 6 years but moved to Dublin 8 years ago. I used to perform as a lead rock singer in a band in my spare time before I moved to Ireland (and before I became a mum!), and I am recently back to having an acoustic piano at home to practice.
I love the sun, the sea, cooking and eating good food (no Domino’s thanks!) and do most of it from scratch at home, which I think has spoiled my loved ones quite a bit! I am a mum of two very smart and very stubborn little girls… they take it after me as my husband is the more patient, sensitive, calm Irish man.
Some people think I have been very lucky in life. I think luck goes to whoever grabs it and creates their own opportunities. My motto is “you can do it!”. -
My pronouns are:
her/she
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My Work:
I design computer programs to make machines “intelligent”. This include capturing sensor data, images, text and processing them to understand danger, help medical diagnosis, and solve complex problems
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Think about the way babies learn things when they are as young as 2 years old: to say new words, to name objects in pictures, to answer simple questions. Even tasks that seem trivial to you like building legos, color an image, understand if a toy is broken by just looking at it⦠As we grow up we learn more complex things: we learn to drive, to cook, to speak different languages, … We also study, we practice, so if we are doctors, we can visit a patient and figure out whether there is a problem, if we are linguists we can understand and translate entire books into different languages, if we are firefighters we can respond to emergencies and understand danger,⦠All these things take a lot of time to learn. What if I tell you that computers, robots, machines can learn how to do these things and sometimes do them faster and better than us? This is what my research work is about: help creating intelligent machines that can learn things the way we learn, but faster. They won’t be able to replace us, but they could help a doctor, understand people feelings by looking at them, drive a car, go into space, translate books into different languages, anticipate danger, and much more. They could also create paintings, music and any other form of art. A machine like that can also answer almost any type of question (because they âknowâ things). One challenge is that most computer programmes able to do these things are not yet as clever as we are: they are not as good as explaining things as their reasoning ability is hidden into complex mathematical and statistical formulas. So I also work on making sure these programmes can work for and with humans, so when you ask âwhy?â, they can answer that too!
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My Typical Day:
My day starts at 7.30am. After I get kids ready for school and send them off, I start checking the agenda for the day, look for urgent emails and respond or take action. I head into my office around 9.30 am and prepare for teaching, look at students cool projects to guide them in their development, and go over most. of the emails tasks. After lunch, before another email check, I try to take time to learn by reading, watching interesting videos about new scientific discoveries, talking to my very smart colleagues scientists and my research students regularlly. I teach as well but not every day. I go home around 5pm, but sometimes I work a bit in the evening too if there is something very interesting I want to finish reading or writing.
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My typical day at work would start at home around 8.30am. I would get to the university by 9.30am, see if I received any urgent message via email, follow up progress of my research students and status of the research projects I am working on (experiments results, interesting collaboration opportunities and so on). I would check my agenda to see who do I have to meet and talk to that day and if I have any class. After lunch and a short walk outside, if I don’t have to meet anybody I read or watch online classes from scientists like me that have something interesting to say, something that can help me design better intelligent machines. I try to do some exercises on a piece of paper to see if I understood what they explained well enough to do it myself. If that works, I do some experiments, and I talk to my student about it and we share some tasks. Sometimes I also plan to record videos or prepare to talk to other people that might be interested or that can help if I get stuck or donât understand some steps.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
I would like to help engineers and scientists like me to create professional short movies or cartoons that can explain their ideas and how they work in practice so that it can be fun to watch for kids, and that can be accessed on the internet.
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Many times I would have liked to create short animated movie clips to be made available online for kids to understand what my work is about. But it is too time consuming and I do not know how to create good cartoons videos. I am sure many of my colleagues, like me, can picture in their head what they would show in a cartoon but they have no time and skills to actually do it. With the money I would like to have a special team working with some of the engineers and scientists I know to create those cartoons.
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Education:
University of Milan (undergrad and PhD), NUI Galway (Scientist), Dublin City University (Professor and Scientist)
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Qualifications:
PhD
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Work History:
University of Milan, NUI Galway, Dublin City University
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Current Job:
Currently, I am an Associate Professor and Research Leader
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Artificial Intelligence Scientist that Rocks!
What was your favourite subject at school?
Computer Science, Music and Art.
What did you want to be after you left school?
I wanted to be a Professor and a Scientist
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Not that I remember
Who is your favourite singer or band?
I appreciate many different kind of music. I had a very long Alanis Morissette phase in my younger years.
What's your favourite food?
Home made pizza. Don’t forget I am Italian :)
What is the most fun thing you've done?
Diving in the Great Barrier Reef
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
Have more time. Be happy. Make someone I love happy.
Tell us a joke.
Why did the jellybean want to go to school? Because she wanted to be a smartie!
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My Comments