Prof. Dr. Ir. Maja Pantic received MSc 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 the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at Delft University of Technology. In 2006, she joined the Imperial College London, Department of Computing, UK, where she is full-time Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing and head of the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG), working on machine analysis of human non-verbal behaviour and its applications to HCI. From November 2006, she also holds an appointment as a part-time Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing at EEMCS of the University of Twente, the Netherlands.

In 2002, for her research on Facial Information for Advanced Interface (FIFAI), Prof. Pantic received Innovational Research Award of Dutch Scientific Organization (NWO Veni) as one of the 7 best young scientists in exact sciences in the Netherlands. In 2008, for her research on Machine Analysis of Human Naturalistic Behavior (MAHNOB), she received European Research Council Starting Grant as one of 2% best young scientists in any research field in Europe. Prof. Pantic is also a partner in several FP6 and FP7 European projects, including the currently ongoing FP7 Social Signals Processing Network of Excellence (SSPNet NoE), for which she is the scientific coordinator.

Prof. Pantic currently serves as the Editor in Chief of Image and Vision Computing Journal (IVCJ) and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part B (TSMC-B). She was the organizer and co-organizer of various symposia on Automatic Human Behavior Analysis and Synthesis in conjunction with the IEEE SMC (2004), ACM Multimedia (2005, 2010), ACM ICMI (2006-2009), and IEEE CVPR (2008-2010). She was the General Chair for the IEEE Int’l Conf. on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2008, Belgium-Netherlands Conf. on Artificial Intelligence 2008, and IEEE Int’l Conf. on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction 2009. Prof. Pantic was also a Visiting Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, in 2005.

Prof. Pantic is one of the world’s leading experts in the research on machine understanding of human behavior including vision-based detection, tracking, and analysis of human behavioral cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviors like laughter, social signals, and affective states. She is also one of the pioneers in design and development of fully automatic, affect-sensitive human-centered anticipatory interfaces, built for humans based on human models. She has 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-computer interaction. She has more than 2500 citations to her work (h-index = 21), has more than 20 popular press coverage (including New Scientist, BBC Radio, and NL TV 1 and 3), is a Senior member of the IEEE, and has served as the Key Note Speaker and an organization/ program committee member at numerous conferences.