I am an Associate Professor at the Information Processing and Telecommunications Center, ETSI de Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Before then, I was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, UK. Previously, I held postdoctoral positions at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, Curtin University, Australia, and Aalto University, Finland. As a PhD student, I also did two research stays at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

My main research activities and interests are in the area of Bayesian inference, with emphasis on multiple target tracking and probabilistic machine learning.

I am a member of ELLIS and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems and IEEE Access.

Research interests

I work in many different areas including:

• Multi-target tracking (radar, sonar, space objects, drones, traffic monitoring, distributed acoustic sensing, computer vision).
• Bayesian filtering and smoothing.
• Sensor management and control.
• Inference over graphs via belief propagation.
• Parallel computation applied to Bayesian inference problems.
• Simultaneous localisation and mapping (5-G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth).
• Gaussian process inference (molecular property prediction, classification).
• Perception for advanced driver assistance systems.
• Health (fMRI and EEG signal processing).
• Battery state-of-charge estimation.
• Financial portfolio management using reinforcement learning.

Awards

• Best paper award for the paper A. S. Rahmathullah, Á. F. García-Fernández and L. Svensson, “Generalized optimal sub-pattern assignment metric,” 2017 20th International Conference on Information Fusion (Fusion), Xi’an, China, 2017, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.23919/ICIF.2017.8009645.

• Third best paper award for the paper Á. F. García-Femández and L. Svensson, “Spooky effect in optimal OSPA estimation and how GOSPA solves it,” 2019 22th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Ottawa, ON, Canada, 2019, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.23919/FUSION43075.2019.9011259..

• Second best paper award for the paper Á. F. García-Fernández, M. Hernandez and S. Maskell, “An analysis on metric-driven multi-target sensor management: GOSPA versus OSPA,” 2021 IEEE 24th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Sun City, South Africa, 2021, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.23919/FUSION49465.2021.9626837.

• Second best paper award for the paper Y. Xia, A. F. Garcia-Fernandez and L. Svensson, “Hybrid PHD-PMB Trajectory Smoothing Using Backward Simulation,” 2024 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (MFI), Pilsen, Czech Republic, 2024, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/MFI62651.2024.10705782.

• Best paper runner-up award for the paper B. Hanlon and Á. F. García-Fernández, “Coordinate Ascent Neural Kalman-MLE for State Estimation,” 2025 IEEE 35th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), Istanbul, Turkiye, 2025, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/MLSP62443.2025.11204271.