Christine Allen-Blanchette, PhD Student in School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Christine Allen-Blanchette, PhD Student in Computer and Information Sciences, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, talks about her research interests.

Transcript

My name is Christine Allen-Blanchette. And this is my fourth year in the Computer Science PhD Program. I think it's the story of many engineering students that they really loved to paly with Legos. I definitely loved that. I stole my brother's Legos. I was in a few summer programs where we did engineering type activities. I guess in college, I did notice that it was a little bit lonely. There weren't a lot of women. There wasn't a lot of racial diversity. And I thought it was important for me to try to do something to change that and that's sort of how I came into the idea of being faculty, which requires PhD.

I work in computer science, more specifically computer vision. Computer vision, we're really trying to figure out how to get robots to be able to see, to be able to perceive image data the same way that we would or in a way that would be useful for us. So if you have a robot in your home and you want that robot to be able to clean your house, it has to have some understanding of what a broom looks like or whatever else, right?

And beyond that I am really enjoying working with video. I think that I'm sort of inspired by the way that we perceive, the way that we're able to understand things. And if you think about it, we sort of see everything in video. So giving your robot or giving your vision system access to video give a little bit more information for it to be able to understand the world that it's in.

Yeah, there are other communities. There are so many activities actually that you can be involved in. So there's Fontaine Society, of course, where we have this sense of community between students who are historically underrepresented in their fields. There is a Fontaine soccer team. There's…I played ice hockey, which I had never done before in my first year here, women's ice hockey here, so I met those women. There are…we have SWEE. We have AWE, all these women in engineering groups. Most of what I know about I guess are the sports, but yeah, there are certainly other ways to find community. Even if you don't find it within your group, but hopefully you'll find it in your group. I mean, it's your home. I feel good about my group.