Address: V.le A. Doria, 6 DMI, I blocco, II piano, stanza 325, Catania

Since August 2019 I am a researcher at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Catania. My research focuses on the study of Computer Vision deep models for Human Robot Interaction and privacy preserving facial recognition for biometric systems. I recently won a 2 years Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual fellowship grant for a robot-human interaction project aimed at promoting active ageing. The main focus of my research inside the project will be on visual action recognition and prediction.

I received my M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Pisa in 2010 (110/110), and my PhD in Biorobotics from the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, in 2014 (cum laude). I was Postdoctoral Fellow at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna from 2014 to 2015, where I was involved in the subproject “SP10 – Neurorobotics platform” of the Human Brain Project (HBP). From January 2016 to November 2018 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Computer Vision Laboratory (VisLab), Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR), Lisbon. My main research interests were on visual sensory-motor predictive controllers and on learning by demonstration for humanoid robots using vision and deep neural networks. From December 2018 to December 2019, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Ryerson Multimedia Research Laboratory in Toronto. My research focused on 6D pose estimation of objects from monocular rgb camera using deep learning.

I collaborated in a number of EU Projects (RoboSom, Human Brain Project) and my research interests are in the areas of deep neural networks, machine learning, computer vision, internal models, predictive controllers and bioinspired robotics.

If you are interested in my full CV, please download it from the following link.

I am currently teaching: