Javier Hernandez

关于

Javier Hernandez is a Principal Researcher in the Interactive Multimodal Futures (IMF) team at Microsoft Research and Associate Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

Javier’s research advances social intelligence for human agent collaboration, bringing together affective computing, conversational AI, and human-centered machine learning. He builds multimodal systems that sense, interpret, and respond to human emotional and social signals, with the goal of making AI interactions more natural, empathetic, and effective. His foundational contributions include the measurement and management of daily-life stress through physiological sensing in everyday settings, work that helped shape how wearable and ambient technologies are used to support well-being. His recent work investigates how large language models break down in collaborative dialogue and how agents can better perceive user states such as cognitive load, empathy, and engagement, drawing on large-scale behavioral data and systematic taxonomy-building methods to inform the design of more reliable and socially aware conversational agents. This research has also influenced how Microsoft products like Copilot are internally measured and contributed to improved Responsible AI classifiers on Azure.

Javier’s work has been recognized with an MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (TR35) award and multiple best paper awards at top venues. His research has been featured in National Geographic, The Economist, and The Times. He serves on program committees for premier HCI and affective computing conferences, gives guest lectures at MIT and other universities, and speaks at a wide range of academic and industry venues.

Javier earned a B.S. in Computer Systems Engineering (2004) and an M.S. in Information Technology (2007) from Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, Spain. He also received an M.S. in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (2010) from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences (2015) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.