Dr Antonio Lopez and Dr Sergio Escalera have received the “ICREA Academia” distinction for the second time

The Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) has awarded ICREA Acadèmia grants to 40 academic staff members from Catalan universities across various fields in its 2023 call. Among the awardees are Dr Antonio Lopez and Dr Sergio Escalera, both researchers at CVC, who previously received the grant in 2018 and have now renewed it for an additional five years.

Through the ICREA Academia grants, the Catalan Ministry for Research and Universities aims to promote research conducted by lecturers in any of Catalonia’s public universities, with the aim of improving the impact of research carried out in universities throughout the country.

The ICREA Academia program, launched in 2008, aims to retain research talent in Catalonia. These grants are aimed exclusively at university academic staff who teach and are in a fully active and expanding phase of their research activity. The ICREA Academia call provides financial support to teaching staff from Catalan public universities, allowing them to increase their research dedication by reducing their teaching responsibilities.

Dr Antonio M. López

Antonio M. López, Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the UAB School of Engineering, leads the research line on artificial intelligence (AI) for autonomous driving at the Computer Vision Centre (CVC). With a long track record as a researcher at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning, driver assistance, and autonomous driving,

Antonio M. López's team has led the creation of public datasets such as SYNTHIA and UrbanSyn, which have garnered international acclaim. Additionally, his team designed and developed the open-source simulator CARLA, in collaboration with INTEL Labs, to democratize autonomous driving research, which has become a de facto standard in academic research and industry. The CARLA project received the National Research Prize for Public-private Partnership in R&I from the Catalan Research and Innovation Foundation and the Government of Catalonia.

His team is also an international pioneer in the development of deep visuomotor models for autonomous driving, trained by imitation. Recently, they successfully implemented a proof of concept of autonomous driving in the mountains of the Catalan Pyrenees (in the Alt Pirineu natural park), an experience documented in "The BrAIn Roads". Furthermore, his team has close collaborations with the automotive industry to bring state-of-the-art AI techniques to the field of autonomous driving.

Dr Sergio Escalera

Sergio Escalera is Full Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Universitat de Barcelona, where he is the head of the Informatics degree. He leads the Human Pose Recovery and Behavior Analysis Group (UB-CVC) and is a Distinguished Professor at Aalborg University and researcher at CVC. Sergio is vice-president of ChaLearn Challenges in Machine Learning, leading ChaLearn Looking at People events, Fellow of the ELLIS European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems working within the Human-centric Machine Learning program, member of the AAAC Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, ACIA Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence, AEPIA Artificial Intelligence Spanish Association, and vice-Chair of IAPR TC-12: Multimedia and visual information systems. He received an Amazon Research Award, a CVPR best paper award nominee and a CVPR Outstanding Reviewer award.

His research interests include affective computing, computer vision, and machine learning, with a focus on characterizing people's personalities and psychological profiles. His main objective is to computationally replicate the human visual system, enabling intelligent systems to ethically interpret human behavior from visual data in non-invasive settings. This interdisciplinary research combines expertise from computing, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and psychology to translate psychological theories into computational models. He has developed pioneering models, primarily using deep learning, for detecting and analyzing people in visual data, encompassing human posture estimation, facial expression analysis, action/gesture/interaction recognition, and automatic personality profile detection.

Among the most cited researchers worldwide

Dr Sergio Escalera and Dr Antonio Lopez have also been recognized in the latest update of Stanford University’s global ranking of the most cited authors in the world, placing both of them among the top 2% of scientists with the greatest influence in the field of artificial intelligence and image processing.

➡️ More information: 5 CVC Researchers Acknowledged Among the Most Cited Globally by the Stanford University Ranking

Additionally, they are ranked among the top 5,000 researchers in Spain and Spaniards abroad according to the CSIC ranking.

➡️ More information: 5 CVC researchers, among the top 5.000 researchers in Spain and Spaniards abroad according to the CSIC ranking