Carla Viegas

Carla Viegas is a passionate AI researcher and entrepreneur, interested in finding solutions for real-world problems. Currently, she is a 4th year dual-degree Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Language Technologies Institute as well as at NOVA University Lisbon. In 2019, she joined TalkMeUp, a CMU spin-off which provides AI-based solutions for automatic feedback on communication skills. She became one of TalkMeUp’s co-founders and led the product and research development for two years as CTO. In 2021, Carla left TalkMeUp and founded Stella AI, where she worked on automatic generation of enthusiastic avatars as well as automatic sign language generation. She returned to be a full-time Ph.D. student in May 2022 and is currently working on decoding verbal and nonverbal meaning of facial expressions used in spoken and signed languages.