PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Agata Lapedriza

Also known as Àgata Lapedriza, Àgata Lapedriza Garcia, A. Lapedriza, Lapedriza Agata

Agata Lapedriza is a computer vision researcher whose career took her from face classification and explainable vision into affective computing and model interpretability. She earned a BS in Mathematics at Universitat de Barcelona and completed a computer science PhD at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2009. At MIT, she worked on explainable vision, scene recognition, emotion perception and social robotics. In 2024, she coauthored a study of cultural representations of mixed emotions in large language models that won the ACII Best Paper Award; her 2025 work includes self-reflective agents for computer-vision model interpretability. As of October 2026, she is an associate research professor at Northeastern and leads AIWELL at UOC's eHealth Center.

Now at
Northeastern University and Open University of Catalonia
Works
118
Citations
21,836
h-index
27
Badges
Links
Website, Google Scholar and LinkedIn

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2009

    Mathematics and a PhD

    She earns a BS in Mathematics at the Universitat de Barcelona and completes a PhD in Computer Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2009, with a thesis titled Multitask Learning Techniques for Automatic Face Classification.

  2. 2012–2015

    Visiting professor at MIT CSAIL

    From 2012 to 2015, she is a Visiting Professor at MIT CSAIL and works on object detection, scene category and attribute recognition, and explainable AI.

  3. 2015

    Scene classifiers learn object detectors

    In 2015, she coauthors MIT CSAIL research showing that a deep-learning scene-classification system also learns to recognize objects.

  4. 2017–2020

    Affective computing at MIT Media Lab

    From 2017 to 2020, she is a visiting professor in MIT Media Lab's Affective Computing group, where she works on emotion perception, emotionally aware dialogue systems, and social robotics.

  5. 2020–2021

    Visiting faculty at Google

    From 2020 to 2021, she serves as Visiting Faculty at Google in the United States.

  6. 2024

    ACII's LLM paper award

    In 2024, she coauthors a study of how large language models represent mixed emotions across cultures; the paper receives ACII's Best Paper Award.

  7. 2025

    Visual agents for interpretability

    In 2025, she coauthors a NeurIPS paper on self-reflective agents that detect visual feature reliance in computer-vision models.

  8. As of October 2026

    Northeastern professor and AIWELL lead

    As of October 2026, she is an Associate Research Professor at Northeastern's Institute for Experiential AI and Khoury College, and leads the AIWELL research group at UOC's eHealth Center.

Career

  1. Since 2023Northeastern UniversityAssociate Research Professor
  2. NowOpen University of CataloniaAIWELL research group lead
  3. 2020–2021GoogleVisiting Faculty
  4. 2017–2020Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyVisiting professor
  5. 2012–2015MIT CSAILVisiting Professor
  6. 2012–2026Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
  7. 2005–2015CERCA Institution
  8. 2004–2008Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Education

  1. 2009Autonomous University of BarcelonaPhD in Computer Science
  2. University of BarcelonaBS in Mathematics

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Agata Lapedriza. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Northeastern University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Agata Lapedriza yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Àgata Lapedriza Garcia - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) recerca.uoc.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. PhD Theses - CVC Computer Vision Center cvc.uab.es. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Agata Lapedriza s3.sunai.uoc.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Agata Lapedriza | EAI ai.northeastern.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Object recognition for free | MIT News news.mit.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Agata Lapedriza s3.sunai.uoc.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Analyzing Cultural Representations of Emotions in LLMs through Mixed Emotion Survey arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.