Advice to Girls in STEM Studies: Be Brave to #MakeWhatsNext English (en-gb)

If you're planning on working in artificial intelligence (AI), you have to have a certain amount of bravery. Not the creeper-smashing, rose-toting iron golem sort of bravery one may encounter in Minecraft, but bravery nevertheless. As Katja Hoffmann, a researcher in the Machine Intelligence and Perception group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, notes, being part of the machine intelligence field means you have to develop an understanding of how learning works – and a big part of that is finding out what doesn't work. In other words, it requires a certain kind of bravery to accept that failure is an important step in the learning process. I had a chance to sit down with Katja to ask her what motivates her to do what she does, and also what advice she'd give to girls considering a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths).