Cristina Palmero

Computer vision and deep learning applied to human behavior understanding and synthesis

Email: c [dot] palmero [dot] cantarino [at] gmail [dot] com

Introducing myself

I am a research associate in socially intelligent robotic systems at the Social AI and Robotics Lab, King’s College London, as part of the SERMAS project. I also lead the UDIVA dataset initiative within the HuPBA group at University of Barcelona, to support context-aware modeling of social interactions.

I hold a PhD in Engineering and Applied Sciences from University of Barcelona, where I focused on gaze estimation through spatiotemporal and multimodal deep learning. I also hold an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and a BEng in Audiovisual Telecommunications Systems from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. With more than a decade of experience across academia and industry (e.g. Computer Vision Center, Noldus IT, Meta), my research lies at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning for context-aware human behaviour understanding, analysis, and synthesis.

News

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.