Aug 13 - From Cold Pool to Hot Queue: Annotation Curation with FiftyOne Workshop

Pre-registration is mandatory to clear building security

Date, Time and Location

Aug 13, 2026
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM ET
Microsoft Research Lab – New England (NERD) at MIT
Deborah Sampson Conference Room
One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA

In this hands-on workshop, you'll use FiftyOne to run the full rare-class mining loop end-to-end on a large unlabeled image pool: compress the pool with near-duplicate detection, embed images with a modern vision backbone, mine candidate positives via seeded similarity from a tiny labeled set, confirm them through targeted human review, and prioritize the survivors for annotation using representativeness and uniqueness scores. You'll then fine-tune a detector on the prioritized examples and come back to FiftyOne to verify the missed-mode clusters actually got covered.

What You'll Walk Away With

• A working FiftyOne pipeline for finding rare classes in any visual dataset you own
• A repeatable four-stage funnel — compress, mine, confirm, prioritize — with a clear objective at each stage
• A fine-tuned detector that demonstrably outperforms one trained on the same number of randomly sampled images
• The mental model that data curation — not architecture or hyperparameters — is the highest-leverage thing you can do to improve a rare-class detector