Dima Damen

Professor of Computer Vision, School of Computer Science,
Lead of Machine Learning and Computer Vision Group, University of Bristol
EPSRC Early Career Fellow (2020-2025)

Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

Short Bio...

Dima Damen is a Professor of Computer Vision at the University of Bristol and Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Dima is currently an EPSRC Fellow (2020-2025), focusing her research interests in the automatic understanding of object interactions, actions and activities using wearable visual (and depth) sensors. She is best known for her leading works in Egocentric Vision, and has also contributed to novel research questions including mono-to-3D, video object segmentation, assessing action completion, domain adaptation, skill/expertise determination from video sequences, discovering task-relevant objects, dual-domain and dual-time learning as well as multi-modal fusion using vision, audio and language.

She is the project lead for EPIC-KITCHENS, the seminal dataset in egocentric vision, with accompanying open challenges and follow-up works: EPIC-Sounds, VISOR and EPIC Fields. She is part of the large-scale consortium effort Ego4D and Ego-Exo4D. Dima is Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TPAMI and associate editor of IJCV, and was a program chair for ICCV 2021. She is frequently an Area Chair in major conferences and was selected as Outstanding Reviewer in CVPR2021, CVPR2020, ICCV2017, CVPR2013 and CVPR2012. Dima received her PhD from the University of Leeds (2009), joined the University of Bristol as a Postdoctoral Researcher (2010-2012), Assistant Professor (2013-2018), Associate Professor (2018-2021) and was appointed as chair in August 2021. She supervises 10 PhD students, 4 Visiting PhD students and 2 postdoctoral researchers.

At the University of Bristol, Dima leads the Machine Learning and Computer Vision (MaVi) lab, and is the university chair of the Research Data Storage Management Executive Board.

At Google DeepMind, Dima is part of the Vision team, led by Andrew Zisserman, focusing on video understanding research. Her latest contribution is to the Perception Test project on measuring perception in AI models

Research Group Members

Long-Term Collaborating Students

  • Chiara Plizzari, 2022-, ELLIS Student co-Advised with Barbara Caputo, University of Turin
  • Jaesung Huh, 2020-, University of Oxford, supervised by Andrew Zisserman
  • Visitors

  • Gabrielle Goletto, 2023-, ELLIS student co-Advised with Giuseppe Bruno, University of Turin
  • Tomáš Souček, 2023-2024, Czech Technical University, Supervised by Josef Sivic and Ivan Laptev
  • Giacomo Zara, 2023-2024, University of Trento, supervised by Elisa Ricci
  • Previous Students, and Postdocs

    Awards and Fellowships

    EPSRC Early Career Fellow, 2020-2025

    Outstanding Reviewer, CVPR 2020

    Outstanding Reviewer, ICCV, 2017

    University Research Fellowship 2017/2018, University of Bristol, 2017

    Nokia Research Collaborator, 2016

    Outstanding Reviewer, IEEE CVPR, 2013

    Outstanding Review, IEEE AVSS, 2013

    Outstanding Reviewer, IEEE CVPR, 2012

    Overseas Research Students Award Scholarship (ORSAS), 2006-2009

    MSc Prize for Best Academic Performance, University of Leeds, 2003

    Workshops and Conference Organisation

    (Ongoing) Program Chair for International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Montreal, Oct 2021

    (Upcoming) Tutorial Chair for International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Paris, Sep 2023

    Organiser for Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing (EPIC), ECCV Workshop, Virtual, August 2020.

    Organiser for Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing (EPIC), CVPR Workshop, Virtual, June 2020.

    Organiser for Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing (EPIC), ICCV Workshop, Seoul, Oct 2019.

    Organiser for Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing (EPIC), CVPR Workshop, Long Beach, June 2019.

    Organiser for Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing (EPIC), ECCV Workshop, Munich, Oct 2018.

    Organiser for Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing (EPIC), ICCV Workshop, Venice, Oct 2017.

    Chair of BMVA Symposium on Transfer Learning in Computer Vision, London, Jan 2017.

    Organiser for Egocentric Perception, Interaction and Computing (EPIC), ECCV Workshop, Amsterdam, Oct 2016.

    Organiser for Cognitive Robotics Systems - Replicating Human Actions and Activities (CRS-2013), IROS Workshop, Tokyo, Oct 2013.

    Organiser for Cognitive Assistive Systems - Closing the Action Perception Loop (CAS-2012), IROS Workshop, Vilamoura, Oct 2012.

    Program Chair of British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), Bristol, Sep 2013.

    Publicity chair and spotlights organiser of IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), San Francisco, USA, June 2010.

    Student organising committee for British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), Leeds, Sep 2008.

    Professional Memberships

    ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) Society Member, 2020 -

    EPSRC Associate Peer Review College Member, 2016 -

    University of Bristol Senate Member 2016 -

    ViiHM Member, 2015 -

    IEEE Member, 2010 -

    BMVA Member, 2007 -

    IEEE Student Member, 2008-2009

    Appointments

    From Aug 2018, I am a Reader (Associate Professor) at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol.

    Previous Appointments

  • Principal Investigator on EPSRC project LOCATE (2016 - 2018)
  • Task leader on EPSRC-IRC project SPHERE (2013 - 2018)
  • Associate Editor for IET Computer Vision, 2014-2018
  • July 2017 - July 2018: Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol
  • Jan 2013 - July 2017: Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol
  • Feb 2010 - Dec 2012: Research Associate (RA) working on the Cognito research project (http://www.ict-cognito.org) working with Andrew Calway, Walterio Mayol-Cuevas and Andrew Gee.
  • Sep 2006 - Nov 2009: I finished my PhD in Computer vision under the supervision of David Hogg.
  • Oct 2003 - Sep 2006: Lecturer at Petra University
  • Sep 2002 - Sep 2003: MSc (with High Distinction) in Distributed Multimedia Systems from the University of Leeds. My MSc thesis was in collaboration with HP Labs
  • June 2002: I finished my undergraduate studies in Computer Science.