Personal details

María Inés Torres received her PhD in Physics from the University of the Basque Country in 1990, including an internship at the Centre National d'Études des Télécommunications in Lanion (France) in 1988. She was also a visiting researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) during the years 1991 and 1992. She has been a member of the board of the Spanish Association of Pattern Recognition and Image, which is a member of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), from 1995 to 2008. She is currently a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of the Basque Country where and held several academic management positions. She founded the Pattern Recognition and Speech Technology research group in 1990, which she has been leading since then. She was also a visiting Faculty at the Language Technologies Institute in Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. She has published numerous papers in journals and international conferences and edited three books. She has lead many research projects most of them funded by the National Science Agency in Spain. Also led research under contract with technical centers and companies. Additionally, she has got a large experience in evaluating research and academic at local, national and international level.

She has conducted research related to speech technologies: automatic speech recognition and understanding, language identification, machine translation, specific processing of Basque language as well as to acquisition and generation of language resources.

Currently her research interests focus on statistical approaches to deal with spoken dialog systems, being also interested in learning from human interaction to generate artificial interaction. She is also aimed at identifying emotions in speech and also at detecting emotional language in social networks. Among her current activities she strengthens international collaborations, mainly with the University of California (Professor Marilyn Walker) and with the CNRS laboratory Télécom Paris-Tech (Professor Gérard Chollet). She is also drafting proposals to H2020 2015 calls.