Rubia Guerra

rubiarg@cs.ubc.ca

I'm a PhD student in Computer Science, working where affective computing, haptics, and trustworthy machine learning meet. I build models that read emotion from the way people naturally touch and fidget, taking a person's own account of what they feel as the ground truth, and I study how the same patterns that make those models accurate can also identify the person behind them. From there, I design consent and audit tools that let people see what a system has learned about them, revise it, and withdraw, treating privacy and care as engineering choices rather than costs we're stuck paying.

If this sounds interesting to you, let's connect!

Personal Homepage

https://rubiarg.github.io/

SPIN Publications

Reis Guerra, R., Cang, L., Chen, P. Y., Rojas, N., & MacLean, K. E. "TouchTales: A Care-Centered Protocol for Recognizing Authentic Emotion from Naturalistic Touching and Telling". IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2026.
Vyas, P., Guta, B., Bao, A., Reis Guerra, R., Solen, M., Himam, N. N. I., Uusberg, A., & MacLean, K. E. “Tattered Teddies and Pentagram Charms: How People Use Touchable Comfort Objects and What This Means for Designing Affective Haptic Systems.” CHI 2026
Hladký M, Guerra RR, Cang XL, MacLean KE, Gebhard P, Schneeberger T. Modeling the ‘Kiss my Ass’-Smile: Appearance and Functions of Smiles in Negative Social Situations. In 2024 12th Int'l Conf ACII, IEEE.
McLaren, Gao, Yin, Guerra., Vyas, Morton, Cang, Chen, Su, Li, Madden, MacLean. What is Affective Touch Made Of? A Soft Capacitive Sensor Array Reveals the Interplay between Shear, Normal Stress and and Individuality. UIST, 2024.
Yin, X., Gao, J., Guerra, R. R., Morton, C., McLaren, D., Vyas, P., Cang, X. L., Ishizaki, R., Madden, J., & MacLean, K. E. "ShearSense: A soft flexible sensing array for capturing shear and normal stress in affective touch". Proc. Eurohaptics - Hands-On
Vyas, P., Bao, A., Guerra, R. R., Guta, B., Davis, K., Uusberg, A., & MacLean, K. E. "The Role of Softness in Touchable Comfort Objects, from a Diversity of Toucher Perspectives" Proc. Haptics Symposium Cross-Cutting Challenges: Frontiers of Softness in S
Feeling (key)pressed : comparing the ways in which force and self-reports reveal emotion (T)
Cang XL, Guerra RR, Guta B, Bucci P, Rodgers L, Mah H, Feng Q, Agrawal A, MacLean K. "FEELing (key)Pressed: Implicit Touch Pressure Bests Brain Activity in Modelling Emotion Dynamics in the Space Between Stressed and Relaxed." IEEE Transactions on Haptics
Nao Rojas, Daniel Chen, Rubia Reis Guerra, X. Laura Cang, Bereket Guta, Karon E. MacLean "A Tool for Capturing Customized Multi-Pass Emotion Self-Reports while Touching and Telling" Demo at Worldhaptics, 2023
Yuna Watanabe, Xi Laura Cang, Rúbia Reis Guerra, Devyani Mclaren, Preeti Vyas, Jun Rekimoto, and Karon E Maclean. 2023. "Demonstrating Virtual Teamwork with Synchrobots: A Robot-Mediated Approach to Improving Connectedness." In Extended Abstracts of the 2
Cang XL, Guerra RR, Bucci P, Guta B, MacLean K, Rodgers L, Mah H, Hsu S, Feng Q, Zhang C, Agrawal A. "Choose or Fuse: Enriching Data Views with Multi-label Emotion Dynamics." In 2022 10th Int'l Conf ACII, IEEE.