Presenter

Paula Dornhofer Paro Costa is Professor and Head of Computer Engineering & Automation at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. With a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering on expressive speech animation, she leads Cognitive Architecture research at Unicamp’s AI Hub (H.IAAC) and is a member of the Brazilian Institute of Data Science (BI0S). Her work bridges computer graphics, affective computing, and generative multimodal AI, yielding patents and 100-plus publications on facial animation, emotion recognition, and interactive systems. A winner of Unicamp’s Inventores Prize, Paula advocates human-centred AI that brings believable, emotionally rich characters and robots to life.