Cristina Tirnauca has a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Bucharest and a degree in Economics from the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania. After finishing her undergraduate studies, she enrolled in the "3rd PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications" (a Quality Mention doctoral program) at the Rovira I Virgili University (Tarragona, Spain) and later on defended her doctoral thesis "Language learning with correction queries" (with the European Doctorate Mention), obtaining the extraordinary doctorate award.
She started working at the University of Cantabria as a “Juan de la Cierva” postdoc (working under the supervision of Professor José Luis Balcázar), continuing as Assistant Professor, and finally as Associate Professor.
Exercising these positions, she has accumulated more than 2000 hours of teaching on 12 different subjects, in Spanish and English (being the teacher responsible for 7 of them), with very good results in student surveys, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level (Computer Engineering, Degree in Computer Engineering, Degree in Mathematics, Master in Mathematics and Computing and Master in Data Science). She has directed numerous end-of-degree and end-of-master projects, tutored various external internships and participated in many evaluation panels for end-of-degree and end-of-master projects.
Her main research directions fall into one of the following four categories: grammatical inference, learning from observation, predictive learning (regression, classification), descriptive learning (association rules or patterns, boolean formulas, lattices, clustering), software engineering. She has two recognized research “sexenios” and has published in various well-ranked journals.
She participated in six national research projects, four regional projects, and seven technology transfer projects, in one of them as principal investigator. She carried out research stays at the University of Turku, Finland, the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan, the Jean-Monnet University, in Saint-Etienne, France, and the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France.
She also has a patent pending with application number EP22382095.2 (Computer implemented method for designing a diet).
She was the winner of the first “UCAmI Cup - Analyzing the UJAEN Human Activity Recognition Dataset” (2018).