Xavier Alameda-Pineda is a Research Director at Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, where he leads the RobotLearn team. He received two Masters degrees from BarcelonaTECH (Mathematics, 2008; Telecommunications Engineering, 2009) and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble Alpes (2010). He completed his PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science at Inria and UJF (2013) under the supervision of Dr. Radu Horaud. He was then a postdoctoral researcher at GIPSA-LAB/Inria (2013–2014) and at the University of Trento with Prof. Nicu Sebe (2014–2016), before joining Inria as a permanent researcher in 2016. He obtained his Habilitation à Diriger de Recherches (HDR) from the University of Grenoble Alpes in 2020 and was promoted to Research Director in 2024. He is also an ELLIS Fellow (2024) and an IEEE Senior Member (2019).

His research focuses on machine learning, computer vision, and audio processing, with emphasis on multimodal perception and learning for social robots. He has coordinated the H2020 SPRING project (€8.3M), led the ANR-JCJC ML3RI project, and co-leads the MIAI Chair on audio-visual machine perception. He has co-supervised more than 20 PhD students and published over 120 papers in leading venues including IEEE TPAMI, CVPR, NeurIPS, ECCV, ICASSP, and ACM Multimedia.

He has received several awards, including the ACM SIGMM Rising Star Award (2018), the ACM TOMM Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award (2020), and the IEEE TMM Outstanding Associate Editor Award (2022). He served as Program Chair of ACM MM 2022, General Chair of ACM MM 2026, and is a founding member of the SIGMM European Chapter and of the ELLIS Unit Grenoble.