Professor Hatice Gunes

Biography

Hatice Gunes is a Full Professor of Affective Intelligence & Robotics, Director of AFAR Lab and Associate Director of CHIA at University of Cambridge. She spearheads award-winning research on multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems, particularly embodied agents & robots, cross-fertilizing research in Machine Learning, Affective Computing & Nonverbal Behaviour Understanding.

Prof Gunes has been named among the “World’s Top 2% Scientists in her areas” by Stanford University in Elsevier since this ranking’s inception & received many accolades and awards: Honoree for Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature 2025, KROS Interdisciplinary Research Award in Social HRI @IEEE RO-MAN’25, Best Paper Award Finalist @IEEE RO-MAN’25, Best Student Paper Award Finalist @IEEE FG’24, Best Paper Award in Responsible Affective Computing @ACII’23, RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award Finalist @IEEE RO-MAN’21,Best Paper Award Finalist @IEEE RO-MAN’20, Finalist for Frontiers Spotlight Award’18, Outstanding Paper Award @IEEE FG’11 & Best Demo Award @IEEE ACII’09.

Prof Gunes was also awarded a prestigious EPSRC Fellowship to investigate adaptive robotic EQ for wellbeing and named a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute – UK’s national data science & AI centre. Her research on creating robotic coaches for assessing/promoting mental wellbeing received Better Future Award @ Cambridge Univ. CST Department’s Hall of Fame Awards’23 & were honoured with Runner-up for the Collaboration Award at Cambridge Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Research Impact & Engagement’23, and received extensive media coverage with >1,700 global reports in The Guardian, BBC News, Medical News Today, ScienceDaily, Sky/ ITV News, Bloomberg, New York Post etc.

Prof Gunes is a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC), General Chair of IEEE ACII’19, Program Chair of ACM/IEEE HRI’20 & IEEE FG’17. She was the Chair of the Steering Board of IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing & is a member of the HRI Steering Committee. She is currently a Staff Fellow of Trinity Hall & a Senior Member of the IEEE. She received competitive grants from Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council UK (EPSRC), Innovate UK, British Council, Alan Turing Institute, EU Horizon’20, Google & CHANSE.

She is regularly invited to give talks at top-tier venues, e.g. UN’s AI for Good Summit’25, addressing scientific & broader audiences. The Friday Discourse she gave @the Royal Institution on Creating Technology with EQ received 33k views on the RI YouTube channel.