Sergio Escalera is a Full Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics at Universitat de Barcelona, an ICREA Academia, and a member of the Visual and Computational Learning consolidated research group of Catalonia. He leads the Human Pose Recovery and Behavior Analysis Group at UB, CVC, and the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics. With more than 300 research papers published, Escalera's research interests include automatic analysis of humans from visual and multi-modal data, with special interest in inclusive, transparent, and fair affective computing and people characterization.

Escalera has received numerous accolades for his work, including the 2008 best Thesis award on Computer Science at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, a CVPR best paper award nominee, and a CVPR outstanding reviewer award. He is also a co-creator of the open-source platform Codalab for organizing challenges, co-founder of the NeurIPS competition track, and the vice-president of ChaLearn Challenges in Machine Learning, leading ChaLearn Looking at People events. He is also Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems ELLIS working within the Human-centric Machine Learning program, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing AAAC, the AERFAI Spanish Association on Pattern Recognition, ACIA Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence, and a Chair of IAPR TC-12: Multimedia and visual information systems.

Overall, Escalera is an accomplished and highly respected expert in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and machine learning, with a particular focus on human behavior analysis and affective computing.