Dima Damen

Dima Damen is a Professor of Computer Vision at the School of Computer Science, University of Bristol, where she leads the Machine Learning and Computer Vision Group. She also serves as a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. As an EPSRC Early Career Fellow (2020-2025) and a Fellow of ELLIS for Europe, her research focuses on advancing computer vision, particularly in egocentric (first-person) vision, video understanding, and action recognition.

Her educational background and professional journey have positioned her as a leader in the field of computer vision, with a particular emphasis on understanding human activities from wearable cameras. She has received numerous awards including Best Paper at ACCV 2024 and Outstanding Paper at ICASSP 2021.

Professor Damen's research interests span multiple areas of computer vision and machine learning. She specializes in egocentric vision, where she has made significant contributions to understanding human activities from first-person perspectives. Her work explores video understanding, action recognition, hand-object interactions, and the development of vision-language models that can interpret and generate instructions from visual data. She has pioneered approaches to unique video captioning, long video understanding through active memory representations, and spatial reasoning from egocentric videos. Her research often bridges the gap between theoretical computer vision and practical applications in human-centered AI.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on egocentric vision, with papers like "AMEGO: Active Memory from long EGOcentric videos" (ECCV 2024) and "HOI-Ref: Hand-Object Interaction Referral in Egocentric Vision" (2024) advancing the state of the art in understanding long-form first-person videos. She has also contributed to vision-language models with works like "ShowHowTo: Generating Scene-Conditioned Step-by-Step Visual Instructions" (CVPR 2025) and "It's Just Another Day: Unique Video Captioning by Discriminitave Prompting" (ACCV 2024, Best Paper). Her research shows a consistent trajectory toward building systems that can understand human activities in natural environments with human-like capabilities.

Professor Damen has received significant recognition for her work, including:

• EPSRC Early Career Fellow (2020-2025)
• ELLIS Fellow for Europe (Nov 2024)
• Best Paper at ACCV 2024
• Outstanding Paper at ICASSP 2021 (awarded to only 3 out of 1700 papers)
• Outstanding Reviewer for CVPR 2020 and 2021
• Program Chair for ICCV 2021

She has successfully advised numerous PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom have gone on to prestigious positions in academia and industry. Her group has secured significant research funding including the EPSRC Programme Grant Visual AI and the EPSRC UMPIRE grant. She actively collaborates with industry partners including Google DeepMind, Adobe, and Meta, ensuring her research has practical impact.

Professor Damen leads the Machine Learning and Computer Vision Group at the University of Bristol, which focuses on egocentric vision, video understanding, and the development of vision-language models. The group has created influential datasets like EPIC-KITCHENS, which has become a standard benchmark in egocentric vision research. Her team regularly participates in and organizes workshops at major computer vision conferences including CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV.