The Social Computing Group at Idiap is seeking a creative and motivated postdoctoral researcher to work on deep learning methods for behavioral analysis from video and audio data.
Social Computing
Video Presentation
Current Group Members

GATICA-PEREZ, Daniel
(Senior Researcher, EPFL Adjunct Professor)
- website

LABHART, Florian
(Research Associate)
- website

MASSÉ, Benoit
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

MURALIDHAR, Skanda
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

SAJADMANESH, Sina
(Research Assistant)
- website

MEEGAHAPOLA, lakmal (Buddika)
(Research Assistant)
- website

PHAN, Trung (Thanh)
(Research Assistant)
- website

SAINT-SUPERY, Santiago
(Trainee)

YELA BELLO, Jenny Paola
(Master Student)
Alumni
- ARAN, Oya
- AVCI, Umut
- BIEL TRES, Joan Isaac
- CAN, Gulcan
- CHÁVEZ-MARTÍNEZ, Gilberto
- CORREA, Salvador
- DO, Trinh-Minh-Tri
- FARRAHI, Katayoun
- FINNERTY, Ailbhe
- GARG, Nikhil
- HU, Rui
- JAYAGOPI, Dinesh Babu
- MARCOS RAMIRO, Alvaro
- MONTOLIU COLAS, Raúl
- NEGOESCU, Radu-Andrei
- OKADA, Shogo
- RADUCANU, Bogdan
- ROMAN RANGEL, Edgar Francisco
- SANTANI, Darshan
- THATTAGUPPA CHITTARANJAN, Gokul
- ZHANG, Dong
Current Projects
- ADIVA - Automatic analysis of verbal and non-verbal behavior and provision of feedback in video selection interviews
- ADVANCE - ADVANCe - Augmented dialogue tool based on verbal and non-verbal behavior computing
- DUSK2DAWN - Characterizing Youth Nightlife Spaces, Activities, and Drinks
- LOIS - Leveraging on-device smartphone inference to address resistance to participate in social surveys
- RISE - Rich Interpersonal Skill analytics for rEcruitment
- WENET - The Internet of US
Recent Projects
- SNACK - Bites’n’Bits: Understanding Eating Routines in Context
- MULTI_CROWD - Tracing Swiss Heritage Speakers' Identities in North America
- SWISKO - Swiss-Korean project to develop and integrate new wearable sensors into the existing DomoSafety ambient sensor system.
- DCROWDLENS - Crowdsourcing the Assessment of Deep Visual Explanations for Subjective Variables
- SOCIALFOOD - Social Food and People: Characterizing Food Consumption Behaviour on Visual Social Media
- YOUTH@NIGHT - A multi-disciplinary multi-method study of young people's outgoing and drinking behaviors
- UBIMPRESSED - UBImpressed: Ubiquitous First Impressions and Ubiquitous Awareness
- MAAYA - Multimedia Analysis and Access for Documentation and Decipherment of Maya Epigraphy
- VALAIS+ - Valais+ Une plateforme pour mieux connaître l’espace de vie du canton
- MIRROR - Mobile Data to Improve Decision Making in African Cities
- HYBRID - Hybrid Recommender System
- MCSC - Mi Casa es Su Casa
- SENSECITYVITY - Mobile Sensing, Urban Awareness, and Collective Action
- DOMOCARE - DomoCare - A new Home Care Preventive Protocol
- NTT - NISHA - NTT Idiap Social Behaviour Analysis Initiative
- SONVB - Sensing and Analysing Organizational Nonverbal Behavior
- LS-CONTEXT - Large-Scale Human Context Discovery from Mobile Phones
- CODICES - Automatic Analysis of Mexican Codex Collections
- YOUBLOG - YouBlog
- NOVICOM - Automatic Analysis of Group Conversations via Visual Cues in Non-Verbal Communication
Group News
The Embassy of Switzerland in Spain is organizing each year a Swiss Innovation Night. This year was under the title "Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Society". Our institute was among the representatives to share its research.
Idiap’s Social Computing Group received a paper award at Pervasive Health 2019. Their research focused on drinking practices pictured on Instagram and classified thanks to hashtags, images, and artificial intelligence.
On April 4th 2019, Skanda Muralidhar obtained the PhD degree at EPFL after successfully defending his thesis, advised by Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez at Idiap’s Social Computing group
Recognized for his outstanding contributions to the field of Web and Knowledge Engineering, Multimedia, the head of Idiap’s Social Computing group is among the most influential researchers according to the AMiner platform.
How to empower communication among people through technology that is aware of diversity? To achieve this goal, the WeNet European project will develop a platform to connect people using ethical principles and artificial intelligence technology. Idiap is part of this project.
The Social Computing Group at Idiap is seeking creative and motivated young researchers (postdocs and doctoral students) for two topics:
Researchers from Idiap Research Institute have carried out a study using smartphone data from young Swiss people to better understand the circumstances in which they are most likely to drink. A computer model developed based on Artificial Intelligence can estimate, with over 75% accuracy, whether alcohol was consumed on a given weekend night.
The Urbis project, which is a collaboration on citizen participation and mobile crowdsourcing between IPICYT Mexico and Idiap, was presented at the First National Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation in Mexico City on August 8 2018. The event was organized by the National Council of Science and Technology.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez (Social Computing Group) talks about social media, machine learning, and diversity with Amenaza Roboto, the new platform for science and technology journalism in Spanish.
Supported by the SenseCityVity research team in Mexico and Switzerland in 2017, the project "Education for Water Protection in Colombia" will participate at the 8th World Water Forum in Brasilia (March 2018), with additional support of the OEI (Organizacion de Estados Iberoamericanos para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura).
Researchers at Idiap and EPFL have been working with psychologists to understand how people form first impressions from photos. They focused on how people respond to properties available on Airbnb. Better analysis of human behavior should allow scientists to program machines capable of making more “human” decisions.
The work by Trung Phan and Daniel Gatica-Perez (Social Computing Group) on analysis of Instagram patterns of food consumption in Switzerland was covered in Swiss news:
Idiap is proud to award James Newling and Gulcan Can for their outstanding work.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez (Social Computing Group) gave a talk about his work in Latin America and Switzerland at the First European Seminar on Urban Data Science in Amsterdam.
This thesis presents visual analysis methods for complex ancient Maya writings, specifically a promising crowdsourcing approach to build a large glyph dataset, competitive data-driven visual representations, and interpretable visualization methods that can be applied to explore various other Digital Humanities datasets.
The SWISKO project, in which Idiap's Social Computing Group participates in collaboration with DomoSafety SA, the University of Bern, La Source School of Nursing Sciences, and the Home Care Association of the Canton of Neuchatel (NOMAD), was featured in the Magazine ASD (Aide et Soins a Domicile).
The Steering Board of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) has announced that the recipient of the 2017 Community Service Award is Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez, Head of the Social Computing Group at Idiap.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez recently presented the civique.org platform in local and international events.
Un cours lancé à l’EPFL permet de découvrir l’impact des nouvelles technologies sur le travail des organisations humanitaires. Les étudiants ont réalisé un exercice grandeur nature avec l’application Civique, développée à l’Institut de Recherche ldiap affilié à l’EPFL, pour faire une analyse critique de ces nouveaux moyens d’informations.
A new EPFL course offers students the opportunity to learn more about how new technologies can be used by humanitarian organizations. The students critically assessed new information-sharing methods by conducting a real-life exercise using the app Civique, which was developed by the Idiap Research Institute, an EPFL partner institution.
The work by R. Hu, J.-M. Odobez, and D. Gatica-Perez on extraction of Maya hieroglyph strokes was covered by Horizons Magazine, the scientific magazine of the SNSF and the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.
The results of a mobile survey on street harrassment in Lausanne were presented yesterday by the City's Observatory of Security.
Idiap researchers presented tools for analysis and visualization of ancient Maya hieroglyphs at the EPFL Open Days 2016 in Lausanne.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez presented work on computational analysis of job interviews and online video resumes.
Darshan Santani presented the Youth@Night project at Workshop on Social Media and Public Security
The SenseCityVity project was presented at Mexico City's First International Conference on Creative Cities.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez discussed the value of geo-localized social media as a new urban data source at the Swiss Days of Official Statistics, Neuchatel, Sep. 15-16, 2016. He illustrated this emerging trend with the Youth@Night project and other recent work.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez gave a keynote talk on "Civic Multimedia, Crowdsourcing, and the Public Good" at the 14th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) in Bucharest, June 16, 2016.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez introduced the SenseCityVity project in an invited talk at the University of Lausanne Seminar on Practices of Digital Humanities on May 25, 2016
Darshan Santani presented the SenseCityVity project at the Tech4Dev International Conference held at EPFL on May 2-4 2015.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez was mentioned in The New York Times in connection with a new crowdfunded project on mobile sensing in the US.
The SenseCityVity project on mobile crowdsourcing, urban perception, and collective action was featured on EPFL Flash.
The SenseCityVity project was presented at the Essential Talks Series organized by the EPFL Center for Cooperation and Development on March 3 2016.
The SenseCityVity project (Idiap-IPICYT) was featured on Mexican TV news.
The Social Computing Group is looking for an intern to develop methods for analysis and visualization of social media and crowdsourced data for social good.
Collaborative research in Mexico by the Social Computing Group at Idiap engages citizens as factors of social change and expands to several cities.
The SenseCityVity project was presented during the The Second Symposium on Youth Research organized by the Youth Institute of Guanajuato (INJUG) in Mexico.
Our colleagues Hector Gomez and Victor Islas (Iberoamerican University & ITSI) present an overview of their initiative with students in Leon City, Mexico.
The MAAYA project was featured in local Swiss radio and TV news.
Algorithms for recognition of Maya glyphs ease the job of deciphering these complex symbols.
Research by the Social Computing Group on analysis of soft skills in job interviews was featured in Bilan, the premier Swiss business magazine.
Marianne Schmid Mast (UNIL) talks about Social Sensing for Psychology and some of the UBImpressed research on HRZone, the popular website for Human Resources professionals:
Ubicomp/ISWC, the two premier venues on ubiquitous and wearable computing, were jointly held in Osaka, Japan, September 7-11, 2015, with an attendance record of over 860 attendees.
The UBImpressed project took part in the HR-Conference Romand, organized at the University of Lausanne, September 8, 2015. Prof. Marianne Schmid Mast and Dr. Denise Frauendorfer co-organized the workshop "Novel technologies to measure verbal and non-verbal behavior", in which social sensing technologies were introduced and demonstrated.
The SenseCityVity and MCSC projects were presented by Salvador Ruiz-Correa (Co-PI of the projects) at the Third Meeting of Observatories for Tourism in Guanajuato City, Mexico, on September 7-8. The meeting was co-organized by the National Ministry of Tourism (SECTUR) and the State Ministry of Tourism of Guanajuato.
Driving in Nairobi is often akin to navigating an obstacle course. Residents can now do something about it thanks to an app developed with EPFL.
The SenseCityVity project was presented by Dr. Salvador Ruiz-Correa at IPLANEG (Institute of Planning, Guanajuato State, Mexico.)
The SenseCityVity project was featured in CONACYT News (Mexico's National Council of Science and Technology).
Laurent Nguyen received the PhD degree from EPFL on May 29th 2015 after the public defense of his doctoral dissertation entitled: "Computational Analysis of Behavior in Employment Interviews and Video Resumes".
After a year of work, the results of the SenseCityVity project were presented at the Don Quixote Iconographic Museum by the team lead by Dr. Salvador Ruiz Correa.
SenseCityVity+, the new phase of the SenseCityVity project, has started today under the support of EPFL Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV).
Daniel Gatica-Perez discussed the work done in the SenseCityVity project at the DigitalPolis Symposium in Paris, France, Jan 29-31, 2015. The symposium gathered a multidisciplinary audience developing theoretical and technical approaches to understand digital cities.
Our work on mobile crowdsourcing for urban awareness was presented at the Symposium PI in Monthey on Friday 28th November.
The results of the SenseCityVity project were presented at the EPFL Center for Cooperation and Development (CODEV) Seed Money Conference, held on October 30, 2014.
The NOVICOM project, led by Oya Aran as Marie Curie Research Fellow and Daniel Gatica-Perez as Scientist in Charge, was featured today as a Project Story on the European Commission Horizon 2020 website. Oya is currently a SNSF Ambizione Research Fellow at the Social Computing Group at Idiap.
SenseCityVity is a Switzerland-Mexico collaborative project between Idiap Research Institute and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), and the National Center for Supercomputing of the Instituto Potosino de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica (CNS-IPICYT), supported by EPFL's Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV).
Katayoun (Kate) Farrahi has joined the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK as a lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor in North America).
Edgar Roman-Rangel (former PhD student at the Social Computing Group at Idiap and EPFL, and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva) has been awarded a SNSF Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship. His project, on the area of computational archaeology, is entitled "Tepalcatl: Automatic Categorization of Potsherds". The project starts on April 1, 2014 and will be conducted at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).
The Social Computing group received a prototype of the new Kinect 2.0 for Windows as part of Microsoft's Developer Kit Program.
The International Symposium of Wearable Computers (ISWC) and the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) were held in Zurich, September 8-12 2013, and featured by Radio Television Switzerland (SRF, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen).
The International Symposium of Wearable Computers (ISWC) and the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) were held in Zurich, September 8-12 2013, and featured by NZZ, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Idiap Research Institute would like to congratulate Dinesh Babu Jayagopi who will join end of this year as an Assistant Professor at IIIT Bangalore. Between 2007 and 2011 he finished his Phd at Idiap, specialized in the field of Social Computing. Currently, he is a post-doctoral researcher at Idiap.
On June 28, 2013, Joan-Isaac Biel Tres made the public defense of his PhD thesis entitled "Mining Conversational Social Video". He received the EPFL diploma from his doctoral advisor (Daniel Gatica-Perez.)
The collaboration between Idiap's Social Computing Group and the Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Neuchatel on analysis of nonverbal behavior in job interviews was featured in Radiotelevisione Svizzera (RSI) scientific program "Il giardino di Albert", aired on 26.05.2013.
The paper "Checking In or Checked In: Comparing Large-Scale Manual and Automatic Location Disclosure Patterns,"
Daniel Gatica-Perez, Idiap senior researcher, head of the social computing group, on stage at TEDx.
Darshan has joined Idiap as a PhD student under the supervision of Daniel Gatica-Perez in the Social Computing Group.
Monday, August 27, 2012 The StressSense system was featured in ACM TechNews.
Our research on video blogging analysis was recently discussed in radio interviews and online news:
On May 20, 2011, Farrahi Katayoun successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled "A Probabilistic Approach to Socio-Geographic Reality Mining ".
On June first, 2011, Radu-Andrei Negoescu successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Modeling and Understanding Communities in Online Social Media using Probabilistic Methods".
Laurent has joined Idiap as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Gatica-Perez.
On January 25th, 2011, Dinesh Jayagopi successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Computational modeling of face-to-face social interaction using nonverbal behavioral cues".
Dr Daniel Gatica-Perez, (from the Idiap Research Institute, in Martigny, Switzerland): “People who are exploring ancient Maya culture – in order to try to find glyphs, they usually use catalogues and this is a classic catalogue. It’s like a telephone book. Instead of names what we have are essentially glyphs and this is a very large collection. And, essentially, if you don’t have computational means to find a glyph you don’t know or a glyph you are learning about, you probably have to parse all of these manually. And this can be time consuming.”
En 2010, Indiana Jones troquerait certainement son fouet contre un ordinateur ou un rayon laser. Depuis quelques années, grâce à un arsenal de nouvelles technologies, les archéologues ont avancé à grands pas. Dans les inventions récentes, il y a ce moteur de recherche capable de déchiffrer l’écriture maya.