Simone Fobi Nsutezo

About

Simone Nsutezo Fobi is a Sr. Applied Research Scientist in the Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab (opens in new tab). Her work leverages computer vision, remote sensing and machine learning to address societal problems in climate change, food security and humanitarian crisis. 

Prior to joining Microsoft, she completed her PhD from Columbia University under the guidance of Prof. Vijay  Modi (opens in new tab) & Prof. Jay Taneja (opens in new tab).  Her thesis work focused on developing deep learning techniques that leverage large amounts of electricity consumption data (obtained from electric meters) and remote sensed imagery, to infer electricity demand. This was of interest to energy providers looking to utilize outputs from such techniques to design energy systems. Concurrently, she applied network optimization & geospatial analysis to design the placement of energy infrastructure, given anticipated demand. She also holds a Masters degree from Stanford University and worked as a Research Scientist at the IBM Research – Africa Lab in Nairobi. 

Her research interests include self-supervised learning,  transfer learning & domain adaptation approaches that support local differentiation, and developing deep learning methods for low data regimes.