Joana Folgado

Joana Folgado is currently serving as a Machine Learning Applied Scientist at Twitch, focusing on enhancing platform safety within the Safety ML team since 2025. Previously, Joana held the position of Machine Learning Research Scientist at Spotify from 2021 to 2025, where efforts were directed towards advancing multimodal content understanding specifically for the podcast vertical through innovative machine learning techniques. An earlier internship as a Machine Learning Engineer at Behavioral Signals allowed for the development of emotion recognition and sentiment analysis models. Additionally, Joana contributed as a Research Assistant at INESC-ID on projects related to distant-speech interaction and social network influence. Joana's educational background includes dual PhDs in Language Technologies and Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University and Instituto Superior Técnico, respectively, along with a Master's and Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico.