Roberto Martinez-Maldonado is a Mexican man with Peninsular Mayan and other Mesoamerican, Iberian, and North/West African heritage. He has lived and worked for more than 16 years on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation (Melbourne), and those of the Gadigal Peoples of the Eora Nation (Sydney), and he acknowledges the Traditional Owners of these lands and their enduring connections to Country, knowledge, and community.

His research in Human-Centred AI in Education and Learning Analytics focuses on supporting human–human interaction in physical learning spaces through sensing technologies, AI, data visualisation, and data storytelling.

Roberto’s current research is in the area of Human-Centred Learning and Teamwork Analytics, in which he utilises his expertise in human-computer interaction, collaborative learning and artificial intelligence. In the past years, his main aim has been to develop methods for assessing and enhancing the performance of collocated teams by making key multimodal activity traces visible and available for computational analysis. Roberto’s innovations have included the design of analytics dashboards, warning systems and data storytelling tools to be used in regular classrooms and in healthcare. More recently, his research has pioneered the application of co-design methods at the intersection of education and data science.

Before the current post, he was a full-time researcher at the Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC) and data visualisation lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). He obtained his doctorate degree in 2014 from the Computer Human Adapted Interaction Research Group (CHAI) at the University of Sydney, Australia. He previously worked on Prof. Peter Goodyear’s Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellowship program – ‘Learning, technology and design: architectures for productive networked learning’ at Centre for Research on Computer Supported Learning and Cognition (CoCo) in the University of Sydney.

A computer system engineer by training and skills, Roberto’s developments are aimed at finding the match between the best blended learning pedagogies and the advantages that emerging technologies may offer to provide continued support for learning on and off campus.

Here’s a link to his most recent publications.