The Spanish Government Office against Gender-based violence has awarded the First Prize, for a PhD thesis that promotes technology protecting women against violence, to José Ángel Miranda Calero, for his research at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Dr Miranda Calero, who joined ESL as a post-doctoral assistant in 2022, pioneered a multimodal fear recognition system. Open datasets and a combination of time, frequency and non-linear domain techniques were employed, with a design process encompassed by trade-offs between both physiological considerations and embedded capabilities.
A database was compiled by subjecting 104 women, who had never experienced gender-based violence, to a range of emotion-related stimuli visualisations.
The jury praised the work for its technical and analytical rigour: “It impeccably develops a project with great practical utility, which in addition to providing innovative and necessary technology to advance the protection of women victims of violence who are at risk, maintains at all times the gender perspective.”
Thesis Abstract