Prof Hatice Gunes

Hatice Gunes is a Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) and the Director of the AFAR Lab at the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology. Her expertise is in the areas of affective computing and social signal processing cross-fertilising research in multimodal interaction, computer vision, signal processing, machine learning and social robotics. She has published over 125 papers in these areas,  with  most  recent works  on lifelong learning for facial expression recognition, fairness, and affective  robotics;  and  longitudinal  HRI  for  wellbeing. She has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and Image and Vision Computing Journal, and has guest edited many Special Issues, the latest ones being the 2022 Int’l Journal of Social Robotics Special Issue on Embodied Agents for Wellbeing, the 2022 Frontiers in Robotics and AI Special Issue on Lifelong Learning and Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction, and the 2021 IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing  Special  Issue  on  Automated Perception of Human Affect from Longitudinal Behavioural Data.

Other research highlights  include RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award Finalist at IEEE RO-MAN’21, Distinguished PC  Award  at  IJCAI’21, Best Paper Award Finalist at IEEE RO-MAN’20, Finalist for the 2018 Frontiers Spotlight Award, Outstanding Paper Award at IEEE FG’11, and Best Demo Award at IEEE ACII’09. Prof Gunes is the former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (2017-2019), was the General Co-Chair of ACII 2019, and the Program Co-Chair of ACM/IEEE HRI 2020 and IEEE FG 2017. She was the Chair of the Steering Board of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2017-2019) and was a member of the Human-Robot Interaction Steering Committee (2018-2021).

Prof Gunes has been an active member of the research community in shaping interdisciplinary dialogue at the international level. She co-led the effort for creating a new area in ACM Multimedia on Emotional and Social Signals (in 2014) which has been running ever since, and she co-led the effort for creating a new Theme on Reproducibility for Human-Robot Interaction at IEEE/ACM HRI 2020. In 2019 she was awarded the prestigious EPSRC Fellowship to investigate adaptive robotic emotional intelligence for wellbeing (2019-2024) and has been named a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute – UK’s national centre for data science and artificial intelligence (2019-2021). Prof Gunes is a Staff Fellow of Trinity Hall, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of the AAAC.