Agata Lapedriza
Associate Research Professor
Agata Lapedriza is an Associate Research Professor at Northeastern University (Boston, MA, USA), with dual affiliation at the Institute for Experiential AI (EAI) and the Khoury College of Computer Science. She is also a Professor at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC, Barcelona, Spain) and an Affiliated Researcher at MIT, CSAIL (Cambridge, MA, USA). Her research focuses on developing AI systems capable of analyzing and interpreting emotions, social signals, experiences, behaviors, and context from visual data, language, and data captured with wearable sensors. She collaborates with clinical psychologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and medical doctors to create robust AI technologies that promote human well-being and enhance human-machine interaction. Her expertise expands different fields, including Computer Vision, Affective Computing, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning (including Deep Learning), Social Robotics, and Human-Computer Interaction.
From 2012 to 2015 she was a Visiting Professor at MIT CSAIL, where she worked on Object Detection, Scene Category and Attribute Recognition, and Explainable AI. From 2017 to 2020 she was a visiting professor at MIT Medialab Affective Computing group, where she worked on Emotion Perception, Emotionally-Aware Dialog Systems, and Social Robotics, focusing on the application of improving Emotional Well-being. She was a Visiting Faculty at Google (USA) from 2020 to 2021 and a contractor at Apple Machine Learning Research from 2022 to 2023.
Her research has been published in highly recognized conferences and journals, such as CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, IEEE TPAMI, and PNAS. Her work has received awards like Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interactions, 2024; and Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human interactive communication, 2020. She also received the Extraordinary PhD Thesis Award at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 2009.
She regularly serves in leadership and organizing roles at major conferences, including the “Workshop on Responsible Generative AI” at CVPR 2025 and CVPR 2024; the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2024 (Undergraduate Consortium Chair); the "IEEE Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interactions” 2023 (Program Chair); the "1st. International Workshop on Affective Understanding in Video" at CVPR 2021; the "15th IEEE Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition", 2020 (Workshops and Tutorials Chair); among many others. She also serves regularly as an Area Chair in major AI and Computer Vision conferences (e.g. NeurIPS; ICLR; WACV; BMVC).
She has extended experience as an invited speaker, including invited talks in industry (e.g. Apple, Telefonica, Netflix, Goolge, Panasonic Corporation, Honda Research Institute, Omron Corporation), academic institutions (e.g. UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT-Medialab, MIT-IMES, Northeastern University, University College of London); conference events (e.g, “Emotion-Aware AI: Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities”, Keynote at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence Research in Applied Linguistics (AIRiAL), Columbia University, New York, USA, 2025; “Emotion Perception and Representation in AI Systems”, Keynote at the RAIN Film Festival, Barcelona, Spain, 2025; "Bodily Expressed Emotion Understanding Workshop", at ECCV 2020; the "Challenges and promises to inferring emotion from images and video Workshop", at CVPR 2020; the "Mobile Learning Week", UNESCO, 2019), and general events for broader audiences (such as “AI for Emotion Perception: Unlocking Opportunities and Overcoming Challenges”, AE Global Summit on Open Problems for AI, Boston, USA, 2024; "Tecnológicas Santa Cruz de Tenerife" 2021, or "European Researchers' Night", Barcelona, 2021), among many others.