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AMBER TINGLE: Welcome to Abstracts, a Microsoft Research Podcast that puts the spotlight on world-class research in brief. I’m Amber Tingle. In this series, members of the research community at Microsoft offer a quick snapshot—or a podcast abstract—of their new and noteworthy papers and achievements. 

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Our guests today are Daniela Massiceti and Martin Grayson. Daniela is a senior researcher at Microsoft, and Martin is a software development engineer with the company. They are members of a team creating technology that can be personalized to meet individual needs. Their research project called Find My Things enables people who are blind or have low vision to train an AI system to find their personal items based on a few examples of the objects. Find My Things has now shipped as a new feature within Seeing AI, which is a free app that narrates a person’s surroundings, including nearby people, text, and objects. The team was also recently recognized by the US-based business media brand Fast Company as an Innovation by Design Awards finalist in both the accessible design and artificial intelligence categories. Daniela and Martin, congratulations and thank you so much for joining us today for Abstracts.