Eadom Dessalene
I am a postdoctoral fellow in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I work with the Perception and Robotics Group and am advised by Yiannis Aloimonos.
I was awarded an Intelligence Community (IC) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. My IC co-advisors are Dr. Simson Garfinkel and Dr. Brian Bataille. I defended my PhD dissertation, Embodied Action Understanding, on September 3, 2026.
My research focuses on understanding human manipulation: how people physically interact with the world, how the structure of those physical interactions can be represented, and how those representations can support robots.
Selected Research and Publications
Recent Talks
FEEL (Force-Enhanced Egocentric Learning): A Dataset for Physical Action Understanding — ECCV 2026 oral presentation, Malmö, Sweden.
Invited presentation: Force Sensing and Egocentric Video — Meta Project Aria tutorial, ECCV 2026.
Invited talk — Meta Reality Labs.
Research presentation to the Maryland Robotics Center Advisory Board — University of Maryland.
Lightning talk: FEEL: Force-Enhanced Egocentric Learning — NYC Computer Vision Day, NYU.
Joint talk with Yiannis Aloimonos: Generative Models of Action: A Socratic Dialogue — NVIDIA Research Radar, NVIDIA (virtual).
Lightning talk: Action Understanding / Organization of Action from Video — NYC Computer Vision Day, NYU.
Competitions
EPIC-Kitchens Action Recognition Challenge 2024 — 4th Place
Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge — Team Lead, University of Maryland (Qualified for Semi-Finals)
EPIC-Kitchens Action Anticipation Challenge 2020 — 1st Place
Amazon Robotics Challenge — Qualified for Finals
Service
Reviewer: ICRA, ICLR, CVPR, PAMI, WACV