Daniela Massiceti

Recent News

• Oct, 2024: I was interviewed about Find My Things on the Microsoft Research podcast, alongside Martin Grayson.
• Sep, 2024: Find My Things was honoured by the Fast Company in the Accessible Design and Artificial Intelligence categories in their 2024 Innovation by Design Awards.
• Sep, 2024: Our paper "Understanding Information Storage and Transfer in Multi-modal Large Language Models" was accepted at NeurIPS 2024.
• Sep, 2024: Our paper "Distilling Knowledge from Text-to-Image Generative Models Improves Visio-Linguistic Reasoning in CLIP" was accepted at EMNLP 2024.
• Jun, 2024: I gave a talk on CLIP's performance gaps for blind/low vision users, and participated in a panel on Equitable AI at the Microsoft Research Forum.
• June, 2024: I co-organised the 6th VizWiz Grand Challenge workshop at CVPR 2024 in Seattle.
• Apr, 2024: Find My Things, a personalisable object recogniser, was shipped as a new feature in Microsoft's Seeing AI app - the culmination of over 3 years' work!
• Feb, 2024: Our paper "Explaining CLIP's performance disparities on data from blind/low vision users" was accepted at CVPR 2024.
• Dec, 2023: Our paper "Strong Baselines for Parameter-Efficient Few-Shot Fine-Tuning" was accepted at AAAI 2024.
• Jun, 2023: I co-organised the 5th VizWiz Grand Challenge workshop at CVPR 2023 in Vancouver.
• Feb, 2023: Our paper HardMD++: Towards Understanding Few-Shot Performance on Difficult Tasks was accepted at ICLR 2023.
• Aug, 2022: I've moved to Sydney, Australia with MSR!
Jul, 2022: We launched the VizWiz podcast, featuring discussions with computer vision researchers, blind technology advocates, and accessibility industry specialists.
Jun, 2022: I co-organised the 4th VizWiz Grand Challenge workshop at CVPR 2022 in New Orleans.
May, 2022: I won the Innovating for the Future Award at the Microsoft Ability Summit 2022.
Feb, 2022: We launched the ORBIT Few-Shot Object Recognition Challenge which will be hosted at the VizWiz Grand Challenge workshop at CVPR 2022.
Dec, 2021: I was invited to a panel discussion on Pursuing a Resilient and Sustainable Global Society as part of Microsoft Research's 30th Anniversary Panel Series on Inspirational and Impactful Research.
Dec, 2021: I gave a talk on the ORBIT Dataset at the Women in Machine Learning (WiML) workshop at NeurIPS 2021.
Oct, 2021: Our team won 1st prize in Microsoft's internal global hackathon out of over 6000 teams!
Oct, 2021: I gave a talk at the Microsoft Research Summit on how few-shot learning can be used to personalise AI systems to users.
Oct, 2021: We reached 200 mentorship sessions in the Indaba Mentorship Programme! If you're interested in mentoring African ML students, sign-up as a mentor here.
Oct, 2021: I joined the VizWiz Grand Challenge organising committee, an annual workshop working to improve AI technologies for the blind/low vision community.
Sep, 2021: Our paper "Memory Efficient Meta-Learning with Large Images" was accepted at NeurIPS 2021.
Jul, 2021: Our paper "ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition" was accepted at ICCV 2021.
Jul, 2021: Our paper "Disability-first Dataset Creation: Lessons from Constructing a Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition with Blind and Low Vision Data Collectors" was accepted at ASSETS 2021.
Jun, 2021: I gave a talk on the ORBIT dataset at the CVPR 2021 VizWiz Grand Challenge workshop.
Apr, 2021: I wrapped up 12 months of languishing away in a global pandemic.
Mar, 2021: I was "upgraded" to Senior Researcher at MSR (and also moved to Cambridge)!
Feb, 2021: I gave a guest lecture on dataset bias at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge.
Jan, 2021: I co-launched the Deep Learning Indaba Mentorship Programme alongside an excellent team including Aviskhar Bhoopchand, Siobhan Hall, and Kale-ab Tessera.
May, 2020: I launched the ORBIT Project, am effort to collect data with blind/low vision users, alongside an amazing team of collaborators.
Apr, 2020: I was appointed as a St. Edmund's College Cambridge Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
Feb, 2020: I started as a Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge.
Oct, 2019: I defended my D.Phil thesis and passed! My examiners were Prof. Andrew Zisserman and Prof. Kristen Grauman.
Sept, 2019: We wrapped up the 3rd Deep Learning Indaba in Nairobi Kenya. I coordinated the Kambule and Maathai Awards (with Adji Bousso Dieng), a How to apply for a PhD workshop (with Laura Sevilla-Lara, George Konidaris), and a computer vision parallel track (with Laura Sevilla-Lara)
Aug, 2019: I finished a 3-month internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge. I worked with Cecily Morrison, Sebastian Tschiatschek and Katja Hofmann.
May, 2019: I submitted my D.Phil thesis "Computer vision and natural language processing for people with vision impairment".