Ricardo Caldas Santana

Academic Background

Building technology that adapts to people, not the other way around

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at KTH (Department of Intelligent Systems) and the Media & Language Research Arena (WASP), supervised by Dr. Pereira. My research focuses on integrating representation learning and large language models (LLMs) for seamless, socially-aware collaboration between humans and machines.

I earned my M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from TU Delft, where I applied deep reinforcement learning to autonomous mobility, advised by Dr. Sharpanskykh and Dr. Wei.

Professional Experience

Before academia, I spent two years as a Digital Consultant at McKinsey & Company, driving AI projects and launching new logistics, insurance, and energy ventures. During my master's, I did a half-year research stint at Sensei, developing real-time 3D human pose estimation.

Current Research

Interested in collaboration or supervision opportunities? Feel free to to discuss potential research synergies.

Affective Computing: Developing models to predict and interpret human emotion in conversations from multimodal inputs;

Human-AI Collaboration: Exploring how LLMs can augment real-time collaboration, producing contextually appropriate, socially aware, and expressive responses;

Communities

I contribute back to the scientific community by frequently reviewing papers at THRI, HRI, ACII, and ICMI.