DR. HATICE GUNES

Short Bio

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Prior to that I was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, and an honorary associate of University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). At Imperial College, I worked on the European Community award winning project SEMAINE that aimed to build a multimodal dialogue system which can interact with humans via a virtual character and react appropriately to the user's non-verbal behaviour, and MAHNOB that aimed at multimodal analysis of human naturalistic nonverbal behaviour. My multidisciplinary research interests lie in the areas of affective computing, visual information processing, and machine learning focusing on emotional data acquisition and annotation, human nonverbal behaviour representation, automatic affective behaviour analysis and prediction, multicue and multimodal emotion recognition, data fusion, and human-computer and human-virtual agent interaction. I have authored numerous papers in these areas and have also served as a co-chair of the EmoSPACE Workshop at IEEE FGR 2011, as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Affective Computing and Interaction Book (IGI Global, 2011), as a speaker at the Int'l Workshop on Social Signal Processing (WSSP 2011) and the Summer School on Affective Computing and Social Signal Processing (ACSSP 2010), and as a reviewer for numerous journals and conferences in these fields. From 2004 to 2007, I was a recipient of the Australian Government International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) awarded to top quality international postgraduate students, and the UTS Faculty of IT Research Training Stipend awarded to outstanding Ph.D. candidates at UTS. I have also received a number of other awards for Outstanding Paper (with M.A. Nicolaou and M. Pantic @ IEEE FG 2011 ), Quality Reviewer (IEEE ICME 2011), Best Demo (with the Semaine team @ IEEE ACII 2009), and Best Student Paper (with M. Piccardi @ VisHCI 2006).