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HUMAINT team

Our approach is interdisciplinary. Our team includes a core team at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Seville, Spain and an group of researchers from different institutions.

JRC Core Research Team

Emilia Gómez (lead scientist) holds BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and a PhD degree in Computer Science. She is a principal investigator on Human and Machine Intelligence (HUMAINT) at the Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission. She is also a guest professor at the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Her research is grounded in the Music Information Retrieval field, where she has developed data-driven technologies to support music listening experiences. Starting from music, she studies the impact of algorithmic systems on human decision making, cognitive and socio-emotional development. Her research interests include fairness and transparency in AI, the impact of AI on jobs, and how it affects children development. She is currently a member of the OECD One AI expert group, the Spanish National Council for AI, and part of the research team at the JRC providing evidence-based scientific support to AI EU policy initiatives, notably the AI Act and the Digital Services Act.

David Fernández (scientific officer) received the Ph.D degree in telecommunication engineering from the University of Alcalá (UAH) in 2008. He was Full Professor with UAH and Head of the Intelligent Vehicles and Traffic Technologies (INVETT) research group until November 2020 when he joined the HUMAINT project at the JRC. He has coauthored more than 130 publications in international journals and conferences, and 12 patents. He received the IEEE ITS Society Young Researcher Award 2018. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the IET Intelligent Transport Systems. His current research interest are focused on trustworthy automated road transportation, automated road transportation, predictive perception for autonomous vehicles, human-vehicle interaction, end-user oriented automated driving, and assistive ITS.

Isabelle Hupont (scientific officer). Bsc, Msc and PhD in Computer Science Engineering, Dr. Hupont has worked in the AI field for 15+ years. She has contributed towards the enhancement and humanization of Human-Machine Interaction, by designing affective-and social-aware tools and algorithms. Throughout her career she has participated in a large number of private and public-funded projects, leading to the transfer of cutting-edge R/D technology to SMEs. She was a senior researcher at Institute of Intelligent systems and Robotics (Sorbonne University, Paris) and has an extensive experience in industry (e.g. Herta security). She also has a strong commitment to gender equality.

Lorenzo Porcaro (scientific officer) holds a PhD in Information and Communication Technology (Music Technology Group, Spain). His research is at the intersection between Information Retrieval and Social Computing, and his main interest is the assessment of recommender systems' impact on people’s behaviours and attitudes. In HUMAINT, he is focusing on auditing such systems to increase their trustworthiness. He has been part of several EU-funded projects: Diversity in AI (DivinAI), Towards Richer Online Music Public-domain Archives (TROMPA) and Musical AI. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from “La Sapienza” University of Rome (2009-2014), a Master’s degree in Sound and Music Computing (2014-2015), and in Intelligent Interactive Systems (2016-2018) from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He also had several work experiences in the industry covering data engineering roles (SoundCloud, MonkingMe, BMAT).

Joao Vinagre (scientific officer) focuses his research on recommender systems, in particular algorithms that learn online from continuous flows of data. He is currently interested in long-term user modelling, online monitoring and decentralised algorithms. More generally, he is curious about intelligent systems and their societal effects. He received his PhD in 2016 from the University of Porto, Portugal. Before joining the JRC, in late 2022, he was a researcher at INESC TEC, one of the largest portuguese research institutes in the fields of computer science, systems engineering and energy, where he participated in more than 15 national and international research projects. He has also worked for 10 years as a software developer and project manager in the industry. Since 2018, he holds a position as an invited professor at the University of Porto, where he teaches courses related to programming and artificial intelligence.

Arianna Sala (scientific officer) has a BSc and a PhD in Psychology (from the University of Florence and the University of Seville) and has been a postdoctoral researcher in Social Anthropology (Federal University of Santa Catarina, BR). She has been in charge of qualitative research projects in the field of education, gender studies and policy evaluation for over twelve years and has been a researcher in several universities, public institutions, International Organizations (such as UN Women and the OEI), and private companies, in Spain and Brazil. At the JRC, she has been the first author of “LifeComp, the European Framework for the Personal, Social and Learning to learn Key Competence” and “LifeComp into Action: teaching Life skills in the classroom and beyond” focusing on the promotion of Socio-Emotional Competences through formal and non-formal education. Her current research interest lies in the impact of social media and online platforms’ use on adolescents’ well-being and mental health.

Marina Escobar is a PhD student at Universitat Politècnica de València in collaboration with the JRC. Her research area is towards trustworthy conversational agents for children, in the field of Natural Language Processing. She holds a degree in Mathematics and a Master in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Seville. After some experience in AI companies in the fields of NLP and Robotics, she joined the Robotics, Vision and Control Research Group of the Univestity of Seville. In 2019, she started supporting the HUMAINT research team of the JRC, until she started her PhD in collaboration with them at the end of 2020. 

Pedro Frau (IT support) is an Audiovisual System Engineer with a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence. He has been working in several fields related to computer science mainly in processes automation, aerial robotics and social robotics. He has had the opportunity to work with research groups at the university level namely SPECS group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and CVAR group at the Technical University of Madrid where he could make contributions with a conference paper and a journal paper in the field of aerial robotics. In the corporate level, he has worked in tech consultancy companies (Everis, NTTDisruption, AKKA technologies) and in defence (Airbus Defense and Space). Currently Pedro is a freelance consultant working for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Seville developing tools to be used on Artificial Intelligence related studies.

Research Fellows/Collaborators

Our project supports a number of fellows which contribute to it in its different use cases.

Former members