Ana Manzano Rodríguez

Hello! I'm a PhD Candidate at the Human-Aligned Video AI Lab (HAVA Lab) in the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with Amsterdam UMC. I am supervised by Prof. Cees Snoek and Prof. Marlies Schijven.

My research focuses on surgical video understanding, developing models that can interpret surgical procedures using foundation models. I'm also interested in Geometric Deep Learning and how it can enrich these representations. Working at the intersection of Computer Vision and clinical medicine, I aim to build AI systems that improve surgical training, evaluation, and patient safety.

I'm a Telecommunications Engineer by training, with a BSc and an MSc (Deep Learning for Multimedia Processing track) from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC – ETSETB) in Barcelona. I began my research journey during an Erasmus exchange at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where my undergraduate thesis focused on medical image processing. During my master's I did two research internships, at Northeastern University in Boston working on action recognition for task guidance using egocentric video, and at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, studying gender bias in Japanese national TV using face detection. While finishing my studies, I worked as a Computer Scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and as a Technical Account Manager for Mobile World Congress (MWC), one of my favorite tech events.

Please feel free to drop me a message, always happy to connect!

Research Interests: Video Understanding • Surgical AI & Healthcare • Action Recognition & Temporal Segmentation • Foundation Models • Fairness in AI • Human-AI Alignment • Multimodal Learning