Alicia Fornés received the B.S. degree in Computer Science in 2003 from the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB) and the Ph.D. degree in 2009 from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She also finished the piano studies at the Conservatory Superior of Music of the Illes Balears in 2001. Her Ph.D. work was focused on writer identification of old music scores. She was the recipient of the AERFAI (Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition Spanish Association) best thesis award 2009-2010.

She received the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award in November 2017 for outstanding contributions in the recognition of handwriting, text and graphics, with high impact to the field of Digital Humanities, and her service to the IAPR Technical Committee on Graphics Recognition.

She was a "Ramon y Cajal" researcher (Senior Research Fellow) during 2016-2021. She is currently an Associate Professor (Profesora Titular de Universidad) at the UAB, and an attached researcher at the Computer Vision Center.

She has participated in several research projects (including European projects) and technology transfer projects. She has published more than 100 papers in international conferences and journals. She has done several research stays abroad, including the University of Bern (Switzerland), the University of La Rochelle (France), the Osaka Prefecture University (Japan) and Uppsala University (Sweden).

From 2011, she has been part of the Executive Committee of the IAPR TC-10 (Technical Committee 10 on Graphics Recognition) as Newsletter Editor (2011-2016), Educational Officer (2015-2016), vice-Chair (2017-2018) and TC-10 Chair (2019-2020).

During 2016-2019, Ramón Valdés (Spanish Philology Dept., UAB) and Alicia Fornés have been the scientific coordinators of the Xarxa d'Humanitats Digitals de la UAB (Digital Humanities Research Network of the UAB) (news, Twitter).

During 2020-2021, she was part of the Executive Commitee of the Associació d'Humanitats Digitals Catalanes (AHDCat - Catalan Association of Digital Humanities).

Since January 2021, she is vice-president of the AERFAI (Spanish branch of the International Association for Pattern Recognition - IAPR). She is also member of the comission "Mujer en Informàtica" from the SCIE (Sociedad Científica Informática de España) to analyze the current situation of women in computer engineering in order to establish synergies and seek measures to reduce the existing gap.

Her research interests include document image analysis, graphics recognition, digital humanities, handwriting recognition, historical documents and optical music recognition.

• Louis Henry award from the European Society of Historical Demography to the paper:
  
• J.M.Pujadas-Mora, A.Fornés, O.Ramos Terrades, J.Lladós, J.Chen, M.Valls-Fígols, A.Cabré. The Barcelona Historical Marriage Database and the Baix Llobregat Demographic Database. From Algorithms for Handwriting Recognition to Individual-Level Demographic and Socioeconomic Data. Historical Life Course Studies, vol.12, pp.99–132. 2022.

• Winner of the Premis DonaTIC 2021, category academic/researcher (Award to Women in ICT - Information and Communications Technology), October 2021.

• Outstanding Reviewer Award of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), September 2021.

• Best Student Paper Award at the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Track 4 "Document and Media Analysis". January 2021. Info here.
• M.A.Souibgui, A.Fornés, Y.Kessentini, C.Tudor. "A Few-shot Learning Approach for Historical Ciphered  Manuscript Recognition". ICPR, 2020.

• Second finalist of the Premis DonaTIC 2020, category academic/researcher (Award to Women in ICT - Information and Communications Technology), October 2020.

• Best Scientific Paper Award at the 17th International Conference on Frontiers of Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR). September 2020. Info here.
• L.Kang, P.Riba, M.Rusiñol, A.Fornés, M.Villegas. "Distilling Content from Style for Handwritten Word Recognition". ICFHR, 2020.

• Best Scientific Paper Award at the 24th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Track 5 "Document Image Analysis and Recognition". August 2018. Info here.
• P.Riba, A.Fischer, J.Lladós, A.Fornés. "Learning Graph Distances with Message Passing Neural Networks". ICPR, 2018.
  

• IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award, November 2017. Info here.

• Best paper of the International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP), August 2013. Info here.
• D.Fernández, S.Marinai, J.Lladós, A.Fornés. "Contextual Word Spotting in Historical Manuscripts using Markov Logic Networks". HIP, 2013.
  

• Best thesis award 2009-2010 by the IAPR-AERFAI (Spanish branch of the International Association for Pattern Recognition). Info here.
• A.Fornés. "Writer Identification by a Combination of Graphical Features in the Framework of Old Handwritten Music Scores". PhD thesis, 2009.
  

• Best paper of the Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (IbPRIA), June 2007. Info here. See the related news at El País.
• A.Fornés, S.Escalera, J.Lladós, G.Sánchez, P.Radeva, O.Pujol. "Handwritten Symbol Recognition by a Boosted Blurred Shape Model with Error Correction". IbPRIA, 2007.
  

• Award to the finalist paper of the “III Edición del Premio Novática” to the Best Paper of 2007. Info here.
• G.Sánchez, A.Fornés, J.Más, J.Lladós. Herramientas de Visión por Computador para el aprendizaje de niños invidentes. Novática, 2007.
  

• Award Ciutat del Coneixement to the project “Aprenentatge Autònom i Integrador per a nens invidents. Reconeixedors de documents amb Relleu”. June 2006.