The Prize Winner

Cordelia Schmid was born in Mainz in 1967. Her father was a physicist, and her mother a teacher of English and French, and later a housewife. “As ­a child I wanted to be a pilot. In school, I discovered my passion for mathematics. And my father’s profession helped me get an understanding of research early on.” 

After graduating from school, Schmid studied computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. She received her master’s degree in 1992 with a thesis on robot vision. “That inspired me to do research in the field of object recognition. At the time, computers were very bad at it; it was even difficult for them to recognise a simple cube.”

In 1996, the prize winner was awarded her PhD at the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (Grenoble INP). In her dissertation, she developed fundamentally new procedures of image recognition—procedures that enabled enormous breakthroughs in computer vision and subsequently became the established standard. “It was the first study that used grey values to identify objects in images.” 

After working as a postdoc at the British Oxford Robotics Institute, she moved to the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technol­ogy (Inria) in Grenoble in 1997, where she received her advanced academic qualification (habilitation) in 2001. She has been a research director of this institute since 2004. Schmid also served as the co-editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision from 2004 to 2013, and from 2013 to 2018 as its editor in chief. Furthermore, Schmid has worked part time for Google Research since 2018.

The old notion that maths is “nothing for girls” is an unwarranted prejudice, according to the world renown computer scientist. Schmid was influ­enced by women such as the nuclear physicist Marie Curie, whose biography fascinates her. “Yet, many of my role models and mentors have been or are men.” She therefore advises “girls and women to not only stay on the lookout for female, but also for male role models and mentors in order to make a career in this supposedly male-dominated field.”

Cordelia Schmid has been awarded other scientific prizes in the past. She wishes to use the funds from the Körber-Stiftung to develop a kind of vision-enabled competitor to the chatbot ChatGPT. This new system would “also interact visually with the real world and have a separate memory for storing knowledge.” 

In her free time, the prize winner enjoys reading crime stories, novels, and psychology books, including books on management. She likes to ski and loves hiking and climbing.