Maja Pantic:

Dr. Maja Pantic received the M.S. and PhD degrees in computer science from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 1997 and 2001. From 2001 to 2005, she was an Assistant and then an Associate professor at Delft University of Technology, Computer Science Department. In 2006, she joined the Imperial College London, Department of Computing, UK, where she is Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing and the leader of the iBUG group, working on machine analysis of human non-verbal behaviour and its applications to HCI. From November 2006, she also holds an appointment as the Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing at the University of Twente, Computer Science Department, the Netherlands. In 2002, for her research on Facial Information for Advanced Interface (FIFAI), she received Innovational Research Award of Dutch Research Council as one of the 7 best young scientists in exact sciences in the Netherlands. In 2007, for her research on Machine Analysis of Human Naturalistic Behavior (MAHNOB), she received European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC StG) as one of 2% best junior scientists in any research field in Europe. She is also the Scientific Director of the large European project on Social Signal Processing. She is the Editor in Chief of the Image and Vision Computing Journal (IVCJ/ IMAVIS), Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part B: Cybernetics (IEEE TSMC-B), Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. She is also on the Board of Governers of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society. Maja Pantic published more than 100 technical papers in the areas of machine analysis of facial expressions and emotions, machine analysis of human body gestures, and human-centered HCI. She has more than 3000 citations to her work, and has served as the Key Note Speaker, Chair and Co-Chair, and an organization/ program committee member at numerous conferences in her areas of expertise.
For more, see personal webpage

Facial Behaviour Understanding

A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. To realize this prediction, next-generation computing should develop anticipatory user interfaces that are human-centred, built for humans, and based on naturally occurring multimodal human behaviour such as affective and social signaling. The facial behaviour is our preeminent means to communicating affective and social signals. This talk discusses a number of components of human facial behavior, how they can be automatically sensed and analysed by computer, what is the past research in the field conducted by the iBUG group at Imperial College London, and how far we are from enabling computers to understand human facial behavior.