Summary

I received a B.S in Computer Systems Engineering in 2004 and an M.S in Information Technology in 2007 by the Ramon Llull University (School of Electronic and Computer Engineering La Salle). The final thesis, entitled "Learning Kernels for Support Vector Machines classification", was written in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA).

From 2007 to 2010, I was a Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh (School of Medicine). At the same time, I became a member of the Human Sensing and Component Analysis groups. Under the direction of Dr. Fernando De la Torre, these groups focus on the understanding of human behavior and the development of novel methods to better represent information, respectively. In 2010, I received an M.S. in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

At the end of 2010, I became a Research Assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA). At the same time, I started a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Science under the supervision of Prof. Rosalind Picard, director of the Affective Computing group at the MIT Media Lab. In 2015, I completed my Ph.D. and became a Research Scientist in the same lab where I founded and directed the Emotion Navigation and Onsite Stress Measurement special interest groups. In 2017, I founded Global Vitals LLC, an MIT Media Lab spin-off with the goal of democratizing physiological sensing. In 2019, I became a Principal Researcher at the Human Understanding and Empathy group and more recently joined the Interactive Multimodal AI Systems group at Microsoft Research, where I explore novel ways to bring emotional intelligence to technology.

My current research centers on responsibly embedding digital empathy into conversational AI—advancing AI personalization, user alignment, and deeper user understanding—while exploring how these empathic agents can augment productivity and wellbeing in the new, hybrid future of work.