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Sandra Malpica Mallo, Assistant Professor

smalpica@unizar.es

Universidad de Zaragoza, I3A


Hi! I am currently an Assistant Professor at the Centro Universitario de la Defensa (Zaragoza, Spain). Previously I was a postdoc researcher at Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC) working with Prof. Nuria Pelechano and Prof Oscar Argudo. I obtained my Ph.D. in Feb. 2023 working under the supervision of Prof. Belen Masia and Prof. Diego Gutierrez at the Graphics and Imaging Lab. I obtained my Bachelor degree at Universidad de Zaragoza, majoring in Computer Engineering (with a Computer Science mention) in 2017. Later, I obtained my Master degree at the same university, majoring in Biomedical Engineering in 2018. During 2019 and 2020 I spent some months as an intern with Adobe Research and Facebook Reality Labs respectively.

I am really interested in the particularities of how people perceive their surroundings, and leveraging this knowledge to address current challenges in the computer graphics field, either software- or hardware-caused. I specialize in virtual reality and in designing, executing, and analyzing user studies to systematically investigate complex aspects of human behavior and sensory processing, particularly in audiovisual contexts.

CV (Last updated on 09/2023)
Sideral (public) CV

Publications

2023

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Task-dependent Visual Behavior in Immersive Environments: A Comparative Study of Free Exploration, Memory and Visual Search

Sandra Malpica, Daniel Martin, Ana Serrano, Diego Gutierrez, Belen Masia

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (ISMAR 2023)

PDF Bibtex Project page

Journal (JCR Q1)

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D-SAV360: A Dataset of Gaze Scanpaths on 360º Ambisonic Videos

Edurne Bernal-Berdun, Daniel Martin, Sandra Malpica, Pedro J. Perez, Diego Gutierrez, Belen Masia, Ana Serrano

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (ISMAR 2023)

PDF Bibtex Project page

Journal (JCR Q1)

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Tutorial: effective user studies in computer graphics

Sandra Malpica, Qi Sun, Petr Kellnhofer, Alejandro Beacco, Gizem Senel, Rachel McDonnell, Mauricio Flores Vargas

Eurographics 2023

Abstract Slides

Conference

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Visual and multimodal perception in immersive environments

Sandra Malpica (supervised by Diego Gutierrez and Belen Masia)

PhD Thesis

PDF

International mention, Cum laude

2022

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Larger visual changes compress time: The inverted effect of asemantic visual features on interval time perception

Sandra Malpica, Belen Masia, Laura Herman, Gordon Wetzstein, David Eagleman, Diego Gutierrez, Zoya Bylinskii, Qi Sun

PLOS One (17) 2022

PDF Bibtex Data

Journal (JCR Q1)

2021

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Multimodality in VR: A survey

Multimodality in VR: A survey
Daniel Martin*, Sandra Malpica*, Diego Gutierrez, Belen Masia, Ana Serrano
ACM Computing Surveys, 2022

PDF Bibtex Journal page

Journal (JCR Q1)

2020

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Auditory Stimuli Degrade Visual Performance in Virtual Reality

Sandra Malpica*, Ana Serrano, Diego Gutierrez, Belen Masia
Scientific Reports, 10, 2020

PDF Bibtex Project Page

Journal (JCR Q1)

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Crossmodal perception in virtual reality

Sandra Malpica*, Ana Serrano*, Marcos Allue, Miguel Bedia, Belen Masia
Multimedia Tools and Applications, 79(5), 2020

PDF Bibtex

Journal (JCR Q2)

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Has half the time passed? Investigating time perception at long time scales

Sandra Malpica*,  Belen Masia, Laura Herman, Gordon Wetzstein, David Eagleman, Diego Gutierrez, Zoya Bylinskii, Qi Sun
Journal of vision, 20(11), 2020 - VSS abstracts

Conference

2019

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A Similarity Measure for Material Appearance

Manuel Lagunas, Sandra Malpica,  Ana Serrano, Elena Garces,   Diego Gutierrez, Belen Masia
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 38(4) (SIGGRAPH 2019)

PDF Bibtex Project page

Journal (JCR Q1)

2017

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Improved intuitive appearance editing based on soft PCA

Sandra Malpica, Miguel Barrio,  Diego Gutierrez, Ana Serrano
CEIG 2017

PDF Bibtex

Conference

Work Experience

Research

Assistant Professor, Centro Universitario de la Defensa (CUD)

September 2024 - Present
Graphics and Imaging Lab group.
Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A).
Grupo CUD Tecnologías críticas para la robótica móvil.
Profesora ayudante doctora

Assistant Professor, Universidad de Zaragoza

September 2023 - August 2024
Graphics and Imaging Lab group.
Profesora interina

Postdoc Researcher, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya

May 2023 - September 2023
ViRVIG group, SENDA Project.

Ph.D. student, Universidad de Zaragoza

December 2018 - February 2023
4 year competitive predoctoral grant. Awarded by Aragon's government

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Research internship

Facebook Reality Labs

September 2020 - December 2020
Internship carried out within the Mixed Reality Team, under the supervision of Alex Locher

Iconos diseñados por https://www.freepik.com

Research internship

Adobe Research

April 2019 - June 2019
Internship carried out within the Graphics, Imaging and Learning Lab, under the supervision of Qi Sun and Zoya Bylinskii

Previous works

Graphics and Imaging Lab

December 2016 - July 2018
Research assistant and junior researcher (N4)

Abaco Digital

June 2015 - September 2015
Curricular internship

Teaching

Bachelor level

Informatics - Electronics engineering degree (Universidad de Zaragoza) and Industrial Technologies engineering degree

2019/2020, 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 academic years

Image editing and composition - Product development and design engineering degree (Universidad de Zaragoza)

2020/2021 and 2021/2022 academic years

Master level

Virtual Reality - Master in robotics, graphics and computer vision (Universidad de Zaragoza)

2020/2021 and 2021/2022 academic years

Supervision

Current students

PhD: design engineering in biomedical and clinical contexts (title TBD) - Ángela Abejez

January 2024 - Present

PhD: DL and real time 3D rendering (title TBD) - Thomas Komair

October 2023 - Present

BsC thesis: Authoring tool for points of interest in natural terrains (title TBD) - Jesús Mendoza

December 2023 - Present

BsC thesis: UAV and UGV vehicles for a paratrooper brigade - Felipe Cebrián

October 2024 - Present

Former students

MsC thesis: Investigating auditory-triggered suppressive effects in virtual reality (9.0/10) - Daniel Jiménez (master student)

January 2022 - July 2022

Development of a tool for data recording and visualization while exploring content in virtual reality (9.0/10)- Pedro José Pérez (undergrad student)

2020/2021 academic year

BSc thesis: Implementation and analysis of 2D scanpath prediction models (7.5/10)- Miguel Gómez (undergrad student)

2020/2021 academic year

MsC internship: Unity pipeline for perceptual experiments - Daniel Jiménez (master student)

2020/2021 academic year

Reviewing and conferences

Reviewing experience

2022

SIGGRAPH, ISMAR, CEIG

2021

VRST, ISMAR, VIRE, IEEEVR,

2020

EUROVR, VIRE

2019

GRAPP, SAP, VRST

Conference organization

2024

Organizing Committee member at the International Summer School on Extended Reality Technology and Experience.

2023

Organizing Committee member at the International Summer School on Extended Reality Technology and Experience.

International Program Committee member for Pacific Graphics

2022

Posters chair for ACM SAP

2022

Program comitee member for CEIG

2021

International program comitee member for VRST