Carme Torras is Research Professor at the Robotics Institute (CSIC-UPC) in Barcelona, where she heads a group of 60 researchers working on assistive and collaborative robotics. She received M.Sc. degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Barcelona and the University of Massachusetts, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). She is co-author of 8 scientific books and nearly 400 articles on neural models, artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. She has supervised 21 PhD theses and led 17 European projects, among them her ERC Advanced Grant project CLOTHILDE on cloth manipulation by robotic assistants.

She is IEEE, EurAI and ELLIS Fellow, member of Academia Europaea, the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, and the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering. She has been awarded the Narcís Monturiol Medal (2000) and the National Research Award (2020) from the Generalitat of Catalonia, as well as the Spanish National Research Award in Mathematics and ICT (2020) from the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the highest scientific recognition in Spain.

Professor Torras is also a fiction writer. Committed to promoting ethics in the deployment of digital technologies, her novels and short stories, written originally in Catalan and translated to several languages, often address ethical dilemmas raised by robotics, AI and social media. Her novel La mutació sentimental —winner of the Pedrolo and Ictineu awards— has been translated into English with the title The Vestigial Heart (MIT Press, 2018) and published together with free online materials on “Ethics in social robotics and artificial intelligence” used in various North American and European universities. She is a member of the Observatory of Ethics in Artificial Intelligence of Catalonia and Vice-president of the Ethics Committee of CSIC.