Projects

These projects trace Nuria Oliver's research career from the MIT Media Lab through Microsoft Research, Telefónica Research, and Vodafone Research. The sections below are organized by career period, with research areas retained within each period. More recent work is represented in the ELLIS Alicante Foundation and her publications.

ELLIS Alicante Foundation

Projects from 2020–now

Understanding People and Society

Beautyverse
Studies beauty filters, aesthetic norms, diversity, and algorithmic bias. The work has appeared in NeurIPS, CHI, and Royal Society Open Science.
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Cognitive Biases and AI
Compares cognitive biases in human decisions, language models, and human-AI interaction.
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Data Science for Pandemic Response
Research spanning population surveys, mobility and citizen data, outbreak analysis, forecasting, and the winning $500K XPRIZE intervention system.
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Human-AI Interaction and Expression

Maike: a Socratic Chatbot
Tests whether a Socratic chatbot can strengthen critical thinking and learner agency. The open-source system has been evaluated in classrooms.
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Art Censorship on Social Media
Examines how algorithmic content moderation affects artistic freedom and the visibility of art on social platforms.
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Trustworthy and Privacy-Preserving AI

Trustworthy AI
Connects research on algorithmic fairness and human-AI collaboration with work on AI regulation.
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Human-Centric Federated Learning
Develops privacy-preserving machine learning methods and studies membership inference, participation, and the protection of personal data.
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Vodafone Research

Projects from 2017–2019

Malaria Mobility in Mozambique
Using population movement patterns to help target malaria-control efforts in Mozambique.
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Mobile Money Adoption
Using mobile data to study the adoption of digital financial services.
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MobiSenseUs
Using aggregate mobile behavior to estimate measures of population well-being.
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Telefónica Research

Projects from 2007–2016

Cities, Health and Social Good

Mobile Data for Social Good
Research using aggregated mobile-network data to study cities, disasters, public health, financial inclusion, and safety.
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MoviPill Medication Adherence
A mobile social game that tested whether competition could help older adults take medication more consistently and on time.
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Bicing: Shared Bicycle Behavior
What Barcelona's shared bicycles revealed about how people move through a city.
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Mobile Interaction, Search and Recommendation

Mobile Attention and Boredom
Studies of whether everyday phone activity can indicate attentiveness or boredom and help time mobile interruptions.
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Mobile Search and Information Needs
Research into what people search for on mobile devices and how location, companions, and interface design shape that process.
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Recommendation Systems
Research on noisy ratings, expert opinions, context-aware models, ranking objectives, and mobile app recommendations.
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ThisOrThat Social Shopping
An early social-shopping app for asking the right friends for advice while making a decision.
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Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval

Computational Multimedia Aesthetics
Models of visual appeal for consumer photographs and videos, and studies of how aesthetic signals can support multimedia search.
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MAMI Mobile Annotations
An early mobile system that let people organize and find personal photos by speaking.
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Microsoft Research

Projects from 2000–2007

Mobile Health and Persuasive Systems

TripleBeat Mobile Training
A mobile personal trainer combining music, competition, and physiological feedback.
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HealthGear Mobile Sleep Apnea
A mobile wearable system for monitoring and analyzing sleep-apnea signals.
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MPTrain Mobile Personal Trainer
A mobile personal trainer combining physiology, music, and exercise feedback.
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Multimodal Perception and Activity Recognition

S-Seer Perceptual Sensing
Uses value-of-information policies to guide perceptual sensing and analysis.
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MIHMMs: Mutual Information Hidden Markov Models
Introduces mutual-information hidden Markov models for richer sequence modeling.
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GWindows Stereo Interaction
Lightweight stereo vision for fluid, non-desktop computer interaction.
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Seer Office Activity
Layered probabilistic representations for learning office activity from multiple streams.
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Interfaces and Computational Graphics

RelAltTab Window Switching
An enhanced Alt-Tab interface that helps users switch to related windows.
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SWISH Window Semantics
Semantic analysis of window titles and switching history to support task management.
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Curve Analogies
Learns statistical models of two-dimensional curves for designing new shapes.
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Image Analogies
Learns image filters by example to create new visual transformations automatically.
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MIT Media Lab

Projects from 1995–2001

Perceptual Intelligence and Human Behavior

Driver Behavior Recognition
A SmartCar testbed and graphical-model framework for recognizing driver behavior.
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Human Interaction Modeling
A research program using probabilistic models and real-time computer vision to recognize interactions between people.
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3D Lip Motion Modeling
A physical-statistical model that learns lip deformation and reconstructs three-dimensional lip motion from ordinary video.
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Coupled HMMs for Action Recognition
A new hidden Markov model architecture for learning interacting processes, demonstrated on two-handed T'ai Chi movements.
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Responsive Portraits
Computer-vision driven portraits that change their pose and expression in response to a viewer.
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Towards Perceptual Intelligence
An accessible guide to Nuria Oliver's doctoral work on teaching computers to recognize and predict individual and interactive human behavior.
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LAFTER Face Tracking
Real-time tracking of lips and faces with facial-expression recognition.
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Wearable and Interactive Systems

DyPERS
A wearable augmented-reality prototype that learned to associate physical objects with personal video and audio memories.
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Smart Clothes Fashion Show
The 1997 MIT Media Lab fashion show exploring wearable technology through international collaboration.
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Wearable ASL Recognition
A fashion-integrated wearable vision system designed to translate American Sign Language into speech and spoken language into Braille.
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Machine Learning and Autonomous Agents

Natural Regularization
A theoretical bridge between generative probability models and discriminative kernel methods such as support vector machines.
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Reinforcement Learning in a Maze
Compares reinforcement-learning algorithms in a configurable maze-world environment.
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Audience Group Behavior
A multi-agent system for modeling audience behavior and group dynamics.
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