Kalin Stefanov

I am an Early Career Academic working in Affective Computing and Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, focusing on technologies for assisting people with sensory disabilities. I received the highly competitive (success rate of 15%) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council for the project Towards Automated Australian Sign Language Translation. I hold a Research Fellow position at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) and I have held Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Research Associate positions at University of Southern California (Los Angeles, USA).

I received the MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence from University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and the PhD degree in Computer Science from KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden). During my PhD studies I was a Visiting Research Scholar at University of Southern California (Los Angeles, USA) and at National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo, Japan).

I am interested in technologies for perceiving and producing human communicative behavior in face-to-face interactions to develop autonomous social systems capable of understanding and acting in social environments considering people’s affective and motivational states. The motivation for my research is the fact that machines which can understand human communicative behavior and can produce human-like communicative behavior, are relevant for a wide range of scenarios, including healthcare, education and entertainment. This multidisciplinary area of research integrates the fields of computer vision, machine learning, multimodal sensor fusion, speech processing, and pattern discovery and recognition.

My personal interests are related to the great outdoors where I exploit the elements through kitesurfing, rock climbing and skiing.