@article {xCanton-Ferrer15, title = {From Catalonia to America: notes on how to achieve a successful post-PhD career}, year = {2015}, abstract = {

Presented at the 2nd Annual Catalan Meeting on Computer Vision - ACMCV (September 18, 2015)

Talk summary

Reaching the green prairies where the big fat tech companies graze has been historically regarded as a hard and painful journey for young freshly graduated PhDs. The amount of contenders is large and the competition may be overwhelming but, despite all, you often see researchers related to Catalan universities that have found a prominent role in companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. By talking to them you start to detect some common factors that contributed to the success of their careers and some common views on the pros/cons related to their experience in big corporations. In this talk, I will present some hints/advice/directions on how to bridge the gap between the end of a PhD and the start of a professional career in the software industry. What is needed? What is the posture of big companies w.r.t. research? Which are our strong assets coming out from a Catalan university (and which are not!)?

Short bio about the speaker

Cristian Canton (Barcelona, 1980) got his MSc in Telecommunications Engineering by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in 2003, carrying out his MSc Thesis at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL), covering topics in image processing and coding. After that, he pursued his PhD at UPC on computer vision and machine learning topics applied to human motion capture in multi-view scenarios. During this period, he was visiting researcher at Technion (Haifa, Israel) and Koc University (Istanbul, Turkey) and took active roles in several EU founded projects. In 2008, he was a Postdoc researcher at NXP in Paris where he developed gesture-based HCIs for mobile devices. In 2009, he joined VICON Ltd., a leading company in the field of vision-based motion capture systems for entertainment and biomedical industries. During 2010-2012, he was EU Project reviewer. He joined Microsoft in 2012 as a senior researcher and developer where transfers technology into real life products such as Surface Hub, Hololens and Skype.

}, keywords = {america, catalonia, computer Vision, job, microsoft}, author = {Cristian Canton-Ferrer} }