01 Sep 2021 | Blog
// Name and location
Yoav Valinsky, Israel
// What is your position?
Computer Vision Researcher.
// What’s the 1st thing you do each morning?
I usually wake-up at 6am (my toddler son is my wake-up call). We play a bit, have breakfast together and around 8am I’ll head to the office. In some days I’ll work from my home-office in the next room, other days commuting to Tel Aviv.
// What does your office setup look like? What tools and software you cannot live without?
As a computer vision researcher, I split my time between developing production code that runs on our edge devices (the AI-based Sensor) to developing research code to explore and improve our computer vision models. For my research work, I have a massive gaming PC (which unfortunately I don’t game on..) with Nvidia 2080 ti GPUs. For everything else, I have a Lenovo IdeaPad laptop. Tools-wise, I use the following quite often: For code management it’s PyCharm and Bitbucket; for experiment management I use DVC and TensorBoard; for dev and research it’s PyTorch, OpenCV, NumPy, and scikit-learn.
// When did you join NoTraffic and why?
I’ve been a computer vision engineer and a data scientist for several years now, and I joined NoTraffic in 2019 because of the technological challenge and the impact of what we’re developing.
// What’s the most mis-understood thing about your job?
In machine learning the difference between 99% and 99.9% is huge.
// Why would you recommend people to join you?
Because we build cool things that actually make a difference and solve a problem that my grandma can understand.
// What’s your favorite hobby, how a typical weekend looks like?
I swam professionally as part of the Israeli Paralympic Team from 2009-2018. I participated in the 2012 and 2016 Paralympic Games in London and Rio, respectively, also winning 6 medals at 4 consecutive European championships. Since retiring though, I don’t enjoy swimming at all. In the last year, I started rowing in order to stay fit. I like to spend my free time with my family, hiking or relaxing at the beach.
// How do you spend your time commuting to work?
Stuck driving in traffic, which is something I’m working to change…
