Maja Pantic

Maja Pantic is a leading AI researcher and professor at Imperial College London, specializing in face and gesture recognition, affective computing, and multimodal machine perception. She is one of the world's most cited researchers in automatic analysis of human facial behavior and emotion recognition.

Her research group develops AI systems that can understand human nonverbal communication — including facial expressions, head gestures, body posture, and vocal cues. These technologies have applications in healthcare (detecting pain, monitoring mental health), human-computer interaction, social robotics, and accessibility.

Pantic has published over 300 papers and holds numerous research awards. She has also worked at Meta's AI research lab. Her work on multimodal AI — systems that can process and understand multiple types of human signals simultaneously — is at the frontier of making AI systems more socially aware and emotionally intelligent.