About

Professor Hatice Gunes leads the Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) Lab at the University of Cambridge, where her research focuses on social, affective, and multimodal intelligence for AI systems and robots. Her work bridges computer science with mental health and wellbeing, and has been recognized with multiple awards, including from IEEE and the University of Cambridge.

She has held leadership roles such as President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing and Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. Her research has attracted significant funding, media attention, and industry interest — notably leading to a spin-out company, a US patent, and over 1,000 global media reports on using robots for mental wellbeing.

Research

• Affective computing
• Social signal processing
• Human-robot interaction
• Social robotics
• Human behaviour understanding
• Multimodal interaction
• Signal processing
• Computer vision
• Applied machine learning
• Computer mediated collaborative and creative interactions
• Aesthetic canons: representation, automatic analysis and prediction.