Cristina Palmero
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Email: cristina [dot] palmero [at] kcl [dot] ac [dot] uk
Introducing myself
I am a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow in the Department of Engineering and an hourly paid lecturer in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London (UK). I also lead the UDIVA dataset initiative as a research affiliate at University of Barcelona (Spain).
I hold a PhD in Engineering and Applied Sciences from University of Barcelona, where I focused on eye tracking using spatiotemporal and multimodal deep learning for remote and wearable cameras. I also hold an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and a BEng in Audiovisual Telecommunications Systems from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. With over a decade of experience across academia and industry (e.g. Computer Vision Center, Noldus IT, Meta), my current work centres on computer vision and neuro-symbolic AI for context-aware human behaviour understanding and synthesis, with applications in robotics and virtual agents.
News
NOV 2025 - Happy to be helping with the organization of ICMI'26 as social media chair, and with the reviewing process of FG'26 as an area chair.
OCT 2025 - I have been awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship to continue my work on context-aware socially intelligent systems with hybrid AI. I'll be accepting PhD studentship applications soon.
AUG 2025 - Our paper 'Enhancing Personality Recognition by Comparing the Predictive Power of Traits, Facets, and Nuances', led by MSc students Amir Ansari, Jana Subirana, and Bruna Filipa, has been accepted to ACII'25!
JUN 2025 - My first PhD student, Zejian Zhang, has successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled 'Deep Learning Approaches for Human Activity Understanding'.
MAY 2025 - I have been awarded the Extraordinary PhD Thesis Award from the Dept of Mathematics and Informatics at University of Barcelona! My PhD thesis has been publicly released and can be found here.
APR 2025 - Our paper 'From Sparse Signal to Smooth Motion: Real-Time Motion Generation with Rolling Prediction Models', led by PhD student German Barquero, has been accepted to CVPR 2025! More info here.
APR 2025 - Our paper 'MixerMDM: Learnable Composition of Human Motion Diffusion Models', led by PhD student Pablo Ruiz-Ponce, has been accepted to CVPR 2025! More info here.
MAR 2025 - Our last paper stemming from the EU EMPATHIC project, 'Exploring Emotion Expression Recognition in Older Adults Interacting with a Virtual Coach', has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing! Find the paper here.
Projects, papers, and datasets
Keeping this page current is on my to-do list. Right after finishing that paper.
Please check my Google Scholar for an updated list of papers.
Follow these links to find how to request access for UDIVA, the EMPATHIC WoZ Corpus, or OpenSFEDS.