Albert Clapés, PhD

Publications (highlighted)

This is a selection of the latest and most relevant publications. For journals, I report Journal Impact Factor (JIF/JCR) as stated in WoS; for peer-reviewed conference proceedings, I report GGS class. Links point to open-access or publisher pages.

2026

• JOURNAL Grosselle R, Lindgaard E, Xarles A, Clapés A, Escalera S, Bak BLV. The feasible-fields method: A deep learning framework for progressive damage modelling of delamination under quasi-static loading. Composites Part B: Engineering, 2027. JIF 14.0 (JCR 2025, Q1). ScienceDirect
• JOURNAL Machado AMS, Daura-Jorge FG, Farine DR, Tarling P, Escalera S, Clapés A, Cantor M. Synchronous human–dolphin foraging increases fishing success despite prey unpredictability. Behavioral Ecology, 2026. JIF 2.2 (JCR 2025, Q1). Oxford Academic
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Xarles A, Escalera S, Clapés A. AdaSpot: Spend Resolution Where It Matters for Precise Event Spotting. CVPR 2026. GGS Class 1 (A++). AR 25.42%.
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Pujol-Perich D, Clapés A, Damen D, Escalera S, Wray M. Beyond Caption-Based Queries in Video Moment Retrieval. CVPR 2026. GGS Class 1 (A++). AR 25.42%.

2025

• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Pujol-Perich D, Escalera S, Clapés A. Sparse-Dense Side-Tuner for efficient Video Temporal Grounding (SDST). ICCV 2025. GGS Class 1 (A++). AR 24.03% (source). Paper
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Xarles A, Escalera S, Moeslund TB, Clapés A. Action Valuation in Sports: A Survey. CVPR Workshops 2025. Workshop of GGS Class 1 (A++). IEEE
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Dalal M, Xarles A, Cioppa A, Giancola S, Van Droogenbroeck M, Ghanem B, Clapés A, Escalera S, Moeslund TB. Action Anticipation from SoccerNet Football Video Broadcasts. CVPR Workshops 2025. Workshop of GGS Class 1 (A++). IEEE
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Pujol-Perich D, Clapés A, Escalera S. SADA: Semantic Adversarial Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Temporal Action Localization. WACV 2025. GGS Class 2. AR 37.8% (source). IEEE

2024

• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Xarles A, Escalera S, Moeslund TB, Clapés A. T-DEED: Temporal-Discriminability Enhancer Encoder-Decoder for Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos. CVPR Workshops 2024. Workshop of GGS Class 1 (A++). IEEE
• JOURNAL Cioppa A, Giancola S, Somers V, …, Clapés A, … SoccerNet 2023 challenges results. Sports Engineering, 2024. JIF 1.4 (JCR). Springer

2023

• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Zhou B, Chen Z, Clapés A, Wan J, Liang Y, Escalera S, Lei Z, Zhang D. Gloss-free sign language translation: Improving from visual-language pretraining (GFSLT-VLP). ICCV 2023. GGS Class 1 (A++). AR 26.15% (source). IEEE
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Xarles A, Escalera S, Moeslund TB, Clapés A. Astra: An action spotting transformer for soccer videos. MMSports 2023. ACM
• JOURNAL Selva J, Johansen AS, Escalera S, Nasrollahi K, Moeslund TB, Clapés A. Video Transformers: A Survey. IEEE TPAMI, 2023. JIF 20.8 (JCR), Q1; position 2/197 (CS AI). IEEE

2022

• JOURNAL Tarling P, Cantor M, Clapés A, Escalera S. Deep learning with self-supervision and uncertainty regularization to count fish in underwater images. PLoS ONE, 2022. JIF 3.7 (JCR), Q2. PLOS

2021

• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Clapés A, Curto D, Selva J, …, Escalera S. Dyadformer: A Multi-modal Transformer for Long-Range Modeling of Dyadic Interactions. ICCV Workshops 2021. GGS Class 1 (A++). IEEE
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Palmero C, Selva J, Smeureanu S, …, Escalera S. Context-Aware Personality Inference in Dyadic Scenarios: Introducing the UDIVA Dataset. WACV Workshops 2021. GGS Class 2. Springer

Earlier years

• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Jacques-Junior JCS, Morral C, Escalera S, Clapés A. ChaLearn LAP 2020 Challenge on Identity-preserved Human Detection: Dataset and Results. FG 2020. GGS Class 2. IEEE
• JOURNAL Ofodile I, Helmi A, Clapés A, …, Anbarjafari G. Action Recognition Using Single-Pixel Time-of-Flight Detection. Entropy, 2019. JIF 2.494 (JCR), Q2. MDPI
• JOURNAL Clapés A, Pardo À, Pujol-Vila O, Escalera S. Action detection fusing multiple Kinects and a WIMU: an application to in-home assistive technology for the elderly. Machine Vision and Applications, 2018. JIF 1.788 (JCR), Q2. Springer
• JOURNAL Palmero C, Clapés A, Bahnsen C, Mogelmose A, Moeslund TB. Multi-modal RGB-Depth-Thermal Human Body Segmentation. IJCV, 2016. JIF 8.222 (JCR), Q1. Springer
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Cepero Á, Clapés A, Escalera S. Automatic non-verbal communication skills analysis: A quantitative evaluation. AI Communications, 2015. JIF 0.364 (JCR), Q4. Link
• CONF. PROCEEDINGS Reyes M, Clapés A, Ramírez J, Revilla JR, Escalera S. Automatic digital biometry analysis based on depth maps. Computers in Industry, 2013. JIF 1.457 (JCR), Q3. ScienceDirect
• JOURNAL Clapés A, Reyes M, Escalera S. Multi-modal user identification and object recognition surveillance system. Pattern Recognition Letters, 2013. JIF 1.062 (JCR), Q3. ScienceDirect

Projects (highlighted)

European Projects

• Diversibus Viis Plurima Solvo (DVPS) — HORIZON-CL4-2024-HUMAN-03, Horizon Europe, Grant: 101213369, Period: 01/07/2025–30/06/2029. Role: project member (UB partnership).
• HappyMums — HORIZON-HLTH-2021-STAYHLTH-01, Horizon Europe, Grant: 101057390, Period: 01/11/2022–31/10/2026. Role: project member (UB partnership).
• Youth-GEMs — HORIZON-HLTH-2021-STAYHLTH-01, Horizon Europe, Grant: 101070421, Period: 01/06/2022–31/05/2027. Role: project member (UB partnership).

National Projects

• Hacia una IA segura y confiable — Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento 2022 (Investigación No Orientada), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Ref: PID2022-136436NB-I00, Period: 01/09/2023–31/08/2026. Role: project member.

Regional Projects (Catalonia)

• Noves dianes terapèutiques en la depressió: el paper de la percepció situacional — La Marató de TV3 – Salut Mental (2021), Fundació La Marató de TV3, Ref: 433/U/2022, Period: 15/03/2023–14/03/2026. Role: project member.

Transference / Industry Collaboration Projects

• Multi-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Improved Visual Understanding — Huawei, Ref: FBG 313528, Period: 05/12/2025–04/12/2027. Funding: €251,406. Role: Principal Investigator.
• A Virtual Clothing Try-On System Based on 3D Body and Garment Reconstruction and Animation — Indústria del Coneixement 2024 – Producte (Modalitat B), Generlitat de Catalunya, Ref: 2024 PROD 00013, Period: 02/12/2024–01/06/2026. Funding: €150,000. Role: Project member.
• NEFA YouAddict EIT Digital Project — EIT Digital 2024, Ref: FBG 23395, Period: 01/01/2024–30/06/2024. Funding: €115,000. Role: Project member.
• Research Services on Fashion Recommendation and Retrieval — YouAddict Srl, Ref: FBG 312945, Period: 06/09/2024–05/03/2025. Funding: €40,000. Role: Project member.
• Consultancy on Milestone AI Research Strategy — Milestone Systems S/A, Ref: FBG 312249; Period: 08/05/2023–07/12/2023. Funding: €7,317. Role: Project member.

PhD theses supervision

• Javier Selva (University of Barcelona, defended on Dec 19th 2023)
• David Pujol-Perich (University of Barcelona, defended on Jun 17th 2026)
• Artur Xarles (University of Barcelona, on-going)
• Michal Choinski (Industrial PhD (AGAUR): University of Barcelona × Restb.ai, on-going)

Teaching (summary)

• University teaching load: 3.375 full-time equivalent years; 135 hours theoretical + 566.5 hours practical (700+ total hours reported).
• Undergraduate teaching (UB): Computer Science / Mathematics degrees (including double degree). Courses taught include: Programming I, Programming II, Data Structures, Software Design, Integrated Software Project.
• Master teaching: Video Analysis at Interuniversity Master in Computer Vision (UAB, UPC, UPF, UB, and UOC) in 2023/24 and 2024/25.
• Supervision: 12× BSc theses (TFG) and 4× MSc theses (TFM).
• Teaching innovation: “Xatbot educativa gamificada…” (RIMDA, UB), Ref: 2023PMD-UB/031 (01/09/2023–30/07/2024).
• Invited teaching: Université Paris-Saclay (Computer Vision master), two lectures in 2021/22 and 2022/23.

Other merits

Awards

• Top reviewer of NeurIPS26 Evaluations & Datasets
• Outstanding reviewer of CVPR26 (top 5%, 16K+)
• Extraordinary PhD Award — PhD, University of Barcelona (2019). Dissertation: “Learning to recognize human actions: from hand-crafted to deep-learning based visual representations”. Cum Laude; International Mention.

Memberships and leadership

• Member of ELLIS. Link
• Vice-president of the IAPR P&P committee. Link
• Area Chair: NeurIPS 2024.

Transference & Dissemination activities

• Scientific advisory
• Scientific Advisor and Consultant for the BitSpace spin-off in the AI Accelerator programme (Xarxa RDI-IA, Generalitat of Catalonia). Link
• Scientific Advisory, AI-Accelerator (BitSpace). Link
• (Co-)organization of International Conference Workshops:
  • 2nd International Workshop & Challenge on Subtle Visual Computing @ CVPR26
  • 12th International Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports (CVsports) @ CVPR26
  • Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions Challenge @ ICCV21
  • ChaLearn LAP Workshop @ ICPR16
  • ChaLearn LAP Workshop @ ECCV16
• Organization of Challenges (and associated Workshop):
  • SoccerNet's Ball Action Anticipation Challenge (associated to CVsports @ CVPR26)
  • Chalearn's Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions Challenge (associated to Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions Challenge @ ICCV21)
  • Chalearn's Identity-preserved Human Detection
  • ChaLearn's First Impressions Challenge (associated to ChaLearn LAP Workshop @ ICPR16 and ChaLearn LAP Workshop @ ECCV16)
• Outreach and Dissemination activities:
  • Organizer, Las màquines intel·ligents també s’equivoquen" (Xerrades-Taller; UB, 2025)
  • Scientific Committee Member, "Anàlisi automàtica d’imatges mèdiques" (Xerrades-Taller; UB, 2014)
  • Co-organizer, "Les màquines: sistemes intel·ligents" (Campus Ítaca; UAB; 2012–2014)
  • Scientific Committee Member, "Màquines que analitzen el comportament humà: la interacció entre l’home i la màquina" (Xerrades-Taller; UB, 2014)

International mobility

• Postdoctoral: Aalborg University (Denmark). Period: 01/04/2021–31/01/2023.
• Predoctoral: Aalborg University (Denmark). Period: 28/06/2018–28/09/2018.