Biography
I was born in the city of Belgrade, Serbia. I finished the high school and studied mathematics at the University of Belgrade until 1992, when I moved to the Netherlands. I received the BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 1995, 1997 and 2001. From 2001 to 2005, I was an Assistant and then an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Delft University of Technology, where I was doing research in the areas of image and video analysis of face and body gestures, affective computing, and multimodal HCI. In April 2006, I joined the Imperial College Department of Computing, UK, as a lecturer, and continued my work on machine analysis of human non-verbal behaviour. In October 2010, I became Professor in Affective and Behavioral Computing. From November 2006 to November 2017, I also hold a part-time appointment as the Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. From April 2018 till April 2020, I was the Research Director of the Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge, where I helped set up the Centre and appoint the team of top machine learning and computer vision experts to work on human-centric AI for mobile devices. In April 2020, I became Scientific Research Lead in Facebook London.
My research aimed at automatic analysis of human facial expressions, called Facial Information For Advanced Interaction (FIFAI), has been funded by the Dutch Research Council Junior Fellowship (NWO-VENI EW-639.021.202) for a period of three years (02-01-2003 to 02-01-2006). This grant is awarded annually to 7 best young researchers of exact sciences in The Netherlands. My research aimed at multimodal analysis of human naturalistic non-verbal behaviour, titled MAHNOB, has been funded by the European Research Council within the Starting Grant Programme for a period of five years (01-09-2008 to 01-09-2013). This grant has been awarded to 2% best junior scientists in any research field in Europe in 2007 (ERC-StG-2007-awards). In 2011, I was awarded BCS Roger Needham Award, made annually to an UK based researcher for a distinguished research contribution in computer science within ten years of their PhD. I am a Fellow of Royal Academy of Engineering 2019), IEEE Fellow (2012) and an IAPR Fellow (2016).