Javier Hernando received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in telecommunication engineering from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 1988 and 1993, respectively. Since 1988, he has been in the Department of Signal Theory and Communications, UPC, where he is currently a Full Professor and the Director of the Research Center for Language and Speech. During the academic year 2002–2003, he was a Visiting Researcher in the Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory, Santa Barbara, CA, USA. He has led the UPC team in several European, Spanish, and Catalan projects and he has also been involved in technology transfer projects. His research interests include robust speech analysis, speech recognition, speaker verification and localization, oral dialogue, and multimodal interfaces. He is the author or coauthor of about two hundred publications in book chapters, review articles, and conference papers on these topics. He received the 1993 Extraordinary Ph.D. Award of UPC.

In 2009, Javier Hernando founded Herta Security, S.L. to generalize voice biometrics to other biometric modalities, such as voice, face and iris, and nowadays it is focused on biometric video-surveillance. During last years, TALP students have joined Herta, and both TALP and Herta have collaborated in joint research projects. In 2014, BioFinder, Herta’s product to track faces in long and highdefinition recording, was the recipient of the Security & Fire Excellence Award 2014 as the best system of the year (Excluding Cameres and Lens). This award sponsored by IFSEC International and FIREX International.