Dima Damen
Assistant Professor, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

April 10, 2017, 3:00-4:00 p.m., Newell Simon Hall 1507

Abstract
As opposed to the traditional notion of actions and activities in computer vision, where the motion (e.g. jumping) or the goal (e.g. cooking) is the focus, I will argue for an object-centred perspective onto actions and activities, during daily routine or as part of an industrial workflow. I will present approaches for the understanding of ‘what’ objects one interacts with, ‘how’ these objects have been used and ‘when’ interactions takes place.

The talk will be divided into three parts. In the first part, I will present unsupervised approaches to automatic discovery of task-relevant objects and their modes of interaction, as well as automatically providing guidance on using novel objects through a real-time wearable setup. In the second part, I will introduce supervised approaches to two novel problems: action completion – when an action is attempted but not completed, and expertise determination – who is better in task performance and who is best. In the final part, I will discuss work in progress on uncovering labeling ambiguities in object interaction recognition including ambiguities in defining the temporal boundaries for object interactions and ambiguities in verb semantics.

Speaker Biography
Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computer Vision at the University of Bristol. Received her PhD from the University of Leeds (2009). Dima’s research interests are in the automatic understanding of object interactions, actions and activities using static and wearable visual (and depth) sensors. Dima co-chaired BMVC 2013, is area chair for BMVC (2014-2017) and associate editor of IET Computer Vision. In 2016, Dima was selected as a Nokia Research collaborator. She currently supervises 7 PhD students, and 2 postdoctoral researchers.