Irene Ballester

Irene Ballester

PhD Student

About me

Hi, I am Irene! I am a PhD student and university assistant at the Computer Vision Lab at TU Wien, Vienna (Austria). I joined CVL as Marie Curie ITN ESR fellow for the visuAAL project, where I conducted my PhD research on computer vision for dementia behaviours. During my PhD, I also actively participated in DIANA and AlgoCare interdisciplinary projects, and collaborated with the KITE Research Institute, University of Toronto, on agitation detection and clinical assessment of movement disorders. I recently started as co-PI on the LEGION project researching ML-assisted chronotypologies for Roman ceramics.

My research focuses on 3D vision and spatiotemporal scene understanding. I’m particularly interested in ML and CV research to solve real-world, interdisciplinary problems across diverse domains, such as healthcare and social sciences.

As a university assistant, I teach and supervise master’s students at CVL. I regularly review for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and WACV, and co-organized the The Good Reviewer workshop at ICRA 2026. More broadly, I believe in open and inclusive science and actively participate in community initiatives to promote women in STEM. Since March 2026, I serve as a Board Director at Women in Machine Learning (WiML).

I’m always happy to discuss research collaborations, opportunities, or questions about my work.

Email: irene.ballester [at] tuwien.ac.at

Experience

  • University Assistant (April 2026 - Present). TU Wien (Austria).
    Courses: “3D Vision” and “Introduction to Visual Computing”.
  • Research Assistant (2021 - Present). TU Wien (Austria).
    3D vision and behaviour analysis for dementia care.
  • Research Secondment (2023). University of Toronto (Canada).
    Collaborated with KITE Research Institute on assistive technologies with Dr. Babak Taati and Prof. Alex Mihailidis.
  • Research Intern (2019 - 2020) German Aerospace Center - DLR (Munich, Germany). Research on dynamic visual SLAM using multi-view geometry and deep learning.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Vision (2021 - Present) TU Wien, Austria.
  • M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering (2017 - 2020) University of Zaragoza, Spain.
    • Exchange: University of Glasgow, UK. (2019)
  • B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering (2013 - 2017) University of Zaragoza, Spain.
    • Exchange: Politecnico di Milano, Italy. (2016 - 2017)