
Luis Fernando D’Haro earned his degree as electronics engineer in 2000, from Universidad Autónoma de Occidente (UAO) in Cali, Colombia, and his Ph.D. (with highest honors) from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) in 2009. During his Ph.D. studies he was a Visiting Researcher at the I6 Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition Group in Aachen, Germany (2005) and AT&T Research labs (2006). Later he made a postdoctoral research stay at the Speech Processing Group in Brno, Czech Republic (2011). From 2014-2018 he made a post-doc at I2R, A*STAR in Singapore. Since 2018 he is Associate Professor at UPM. His current research is mainly focused on Spoken Dialogue Systems and Natural Language Processing. Previously, he has worked on Speaker and Language Recognition, and Machine Translation. He has participated in the organization of DSTC4-12, DBDC4-5 challenges, and 2020 Chanel workshop at Johns Hopkins-University.
Luis Fernando’s resume shows a high number of research merits and results. For instance, he got a 4.7 (max. 5.0) average mark for his degree as an Electronic Engineer and a national award for his dissertation. He then obtained the highest score for his PhD thesis (summa cum laude) also including the European Mention in a PhD program with Quality Mention from the Spanish Government. He has 7 National and Regional accreditations (ANECA, ACAP and DOCENTIA-UPM). He has three 6-years research merits (3 sexenios) and two 5-years educational merits (2 quinquenios).
He has participated in +43 research projects (3 European, 18 National, 12 private, 13 institutional). He has around +150 publications (including 27 JCR papers, 8 with SJR index, 100 international and 35 national articles. H-index: 28, Cites: +2800). He has also 5 patents and commercial licenses (including AT&T and A*STAR, Singapore), and a European report about Voice interfaces for digital services. He has been PI in +5 projects (including the coordination of EIC Project: ASTOUND and 2 with Amazon).
Luis Fernando has been awarded with up to 6 different scholarships for doing research stays in Germany, USA, Czech Republic, USA, and France. In addition, he led the winning team for the ALBAYZIN LRE12 competition on language recognition, won the DSTC3 competition, and was top 3% in the Youtube8M challenge (Google). He has been also a student advisor for different competitions like ATOS-IT, Telefonica UPM, and Google Science Fair 2015 (where his student won the International Google Technologist Award in Google Science Fair 2015). He was the faculty advisor for team (Genuine2 and THAURUS) that was selected for the prestigious Amazon Alexa Prize Challenges (SGC4 and SGC5) being the only Spanish team in both cases.
Luis Fernando is currently member of different research communities like TecHabla and TIMM Spanish networks, IEEE, ISCA, SigDial, and Colips. He is Associate editor for the IEEE TASLP journal (Q1), reviewer of at least 7 indexed journals by Thomson Reuters. He was the general chair for IWSDS2020 held on Madrid (Sept 21-23, 2020) with more than 180 registered participants. Recently he obtained the Outstanding Senior Area Chair award for EMNLP2024.
Finally, Luis has an outstanding professional experience as a professor for +15 years and as research scientist during 4.5 years at the most important research institute in Singapore: I2R, A*STAR.
Email: luisfernando.dharo@upm.es
Office: B-108
Phone: +34-910672174
Dpto. Ingeniería Electrónica. E.T.S.I. de Telecomunicación. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Ciudad Universitaria s/n. 28040-MADRID-SPAIN.