Curriculum Vitae

Research Experience:

June 2011 till now: Research Associate at Imperial College London (UK) under the supervision of Dr. Yiannis Demiris working on the topics attention and timing inside EFAA eu-project.

October -December 2010: Visiting Researcher at University of Massachusetts (USA) to collaborate with professor Shlomo Zilberstein.

June 2009: Visiting researcher at Reykjavik University (Iceland), to work with Prof. Kristinn R. Thórisson on Humanbos Project.

1 May 2009 till June 2011: Research Assistant at the Institute of Science and Technologies of Cognition – National Council of the Researches(http://www.istc.cnr.it/) in Rome(Italy), under the supervision of Dr. Giovanni Pezzulo, on the topic: Development of software cognitive adaptive architectures which integrate active perception and motor control

16 March 2006 till 31 April 2009: Research Assistant in the Laboratory of Autonomous Robotics and Artificial Life at the Institute of Science and Technologies of Cognition – National Council of the Researches(http://www.istc.cnr.it/) in Rome(Italy), under the supervision of Dr. Gianluca Baldassarre and Dr. Stefano Nolfi, on the topic of biologically inspired models for motor and perception adaptive control inside the European Projects:

Mindraces-From Reactive to Anticipatory Cognitive Embodied Systems (FP6-511931)

ICEA-Integrating Cognition Emotions and Autonomy (FP6-511931)

Grants

September 2010 EUCogII 2880€ grant to support faculty exchange with Prof. Zilberstein's ResourceBounded Reasoning Lab (RBRLAB) in UMass Amherst on the research project: A bounded rationality approach to the development of cognitive robots

Education

Studies:

1. Phd in Robotics, May 2009, University of Genoa, Italy.
2. Thesis Title: Ecological Adaptive Perception from a Neuro-Robotic perspective: theory, architecture and experiments
3. Laurea Degree in Computer Engineering (Ingegneria
4. Informatica V.O.), Final Mark: 110/110 with full honors, November 2004, University of Palermo, Italy.
5. Thesis Title :Study of Algorithms and Techniques for Speech
6. Recognition And Conversational Systems (Studio di Algoritmi e Tecniche per
7. il Riconoscimento Vocale e i Sistemi Conversazionali)
8. High School Studies (Liceo Scientifico) Final Mark: 50/60, Liceo Scientifico Alessandro Volta July 1995, Caltanissetta, Italy.

Mathematical tools and method used:

1. Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
2. POMDP
3. MDP
4. Dynamic Bayesian Network
5. Unsupervised Learning
6. Visual Recognition algorithms
7. Artificial Neural Networks (Self Organizing, Recurrent, Feed-Forward, Echo-state)
8. Optimal and probabilistic methods for robot controls.

Summer Schools:

1. 4th European School of Neuro-IT and Neuroengineering Dynamics, Computation
2. and Learning in Neural Systems, June 13-17 2006, Genoa, Italy (http://www.neuro-it.net/pages/summer5.html)
3. VVV 2006 RobotCub Summer School, July 17-26 2006,Ventimiglia. Italy (http://eris.liralab.it/summerschool2006/)
4. 5th European Neuro-IT and Neuroengineering School- Cognition & Action, Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), July 15-21 2007, Delmenhorst,Germany (http://www.neuro-it.net/pages/summer_2007.html)
5. FIAS Summer School 2007, Theoretical Neuroscience and Complex Systems, August 4-26 2007, Frankfurt, Germany (http://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/neuro_school/neuro_school2007/index.html)
6. Cognitive Science and Machine Learning Summer School, May 6-12 2010, Pula, Sardinia, Italy (http://www.mlss.cc/sardinia10)

Workshops:

1. IM-CLeVeR International Workshop, from Nov 15, 2009 to Nov 17, 2009, Venice, Italy (http://im-clever.noze.it/announcements/events/im-clever-international-workshop)
2. International workshop on Computational principles of sensorimotor learning, September 13-15 2009, Kloster Irsee, Germany (http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/motorcontrol/Irsee/index.html)
3. ITALK Roadmap meeting, 22-24 September 2008, Rome, Italy (http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/SoCCE/ITALK/documents/roadmap%20meeting%20Rome/Programme_ITALK-Road%20Map-RM.pdf)
4. WIVACE2007, Italian Workshop of Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation, 5-7 September 2007, Sampieri, Italy (http://www.dmi.unict.it/wivace2007/)
5. WIVA 2006, 3th Italian Workshop of Artificial Life, 12-15 September 2006, Siena, Italy (http://laral.istc.cnr.it/wiva3/ProgrammaWIVA3.pdf)

Conferences:

1. TAROS 2011, 12th Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, Aug 31, 2011 - Sep 2, 2011, Sheffield UK
2. SAB'10, The Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior,
3. AGI2010, The third conference on Artificial General Intelligence, March 5-8 (Fri-Mon) 2010, Lugano, Switzerland,
   1. Epirob09, Ninth International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, 12-14 November 2009, Venice, Italy
   2. EMBL International PhD Symposium 2008, Decision making in Biology - Nature at the Crossroads, 23 - 25 October 2008, Heidelberg, Germany (http://www.phdsymposium.embl.org/symp2008/).
   3. SAB'08, The Tenth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, 7-13 July 2008, Osaka, Japansab08(http://www.isab.org/sab08/)
   4. SAB'06, The Ninth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior,
      1. 25-30 September 2006, CNR, Roma, Italy (http://www.isab.org/sab06/)
   5. ICCM'06, The 7th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, 5-8 April 2006, Trieste, Italy (http://iccm2006.units.it/)

Software Development Experiences

1. Development of bayesian controllers for a real time control of a Pong simulator, using Matlab and C++ for distributed controllers (2009)
2. Development of simulation platform for distributed real time controllers, integrating Blender with YARP and Matlab, using Python scripts. (2009)
3. Development and testing of a bioinspired robotic eye-hand control architecture based on neural networks which integrates reinforcement learning and acquisition of population coded goal directed actions. Language used: JAVA (2007)
4. co-developer of the Open Source Project XORM, (http://xorm.sourceforge.net),it allows to map abstract classes and interfaces to RDBMS entities like table rows
5. developed an mobile agent system based on IBM's Aglet technology. My system comprised a library of classes for remote agent control and the building of a distributed community of agent platforms with robust capabilities. Language use: JAVA
6. Development of a Software Agenda based on natural language input. Language used:C++ with the use of STL and RTTI, designed with UML.
7. Development of an amatorial video game, a platform one like Super Mario, SW&HW used: Turbo Pascal e Assembly for a 80286 VGA system.
8. Development of a distributed university book store managing system. Along the project I've developed an MVC middle layer. I've used XORM to realize Object Relational Mapping. The system supported PointBase, MySQL and Access. The application was designed using UML, Patterns and Refactoring techniques.
9. Development of FIC-U-BOT, a soft-bot that won (with the lowest score of 22-7) the 2003 edition of the tournament of Capture the flag for soft-bot(based on TeamBots) of the Computer Engineering Course of University of Palermo. Language: JAVA
10. co-developer of Akira (www.akira-project.net) project, a MAS system based on the Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. The software itself is a run-time C++ multithreading environment able to execute Agents and a web/system development platform to model their behaviour. The system core is made up of a server daemon that responds to the network web programming and A.I. requests and that physically executes Agent's instances, plus a programming interface based on a MACRO language and some automated scripts that allows to create new Agents. The whole system is written in C++ and integrates different C++ open source software, implementing various aspects of the framework. Two soft computing technologies are provided: Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. A strong multithread model ensures great scalability and computational power. With respect to the other agent oriented software, AKIRA implements an innovative cognitive model, that is the result of an upcoming cognitive theory, studied at the ISTC-CNR in Rome. The project was evaluated the best one by the technical commission in the first Italian Open Source Contest.
1. Language: C++

Programming and Software Skills

• Operating Systems: Linux, Windows 9.x,Windows XP, MS-DOS,Mac OS-X
• Programming Languages : Pascal, C, C++, Java, Prolog, Lisp, VHDL, HTML, XML, VoiceXML, Assembly, UML, Matlab, Mathematica, Latex
• Developing Environments: Netbeans, Rational Rose, Borland C++, JBuilder, Sun1Studio,VisualParadigm UML
• Database Managing Systems: PostgreSQL, MySQL 3.0, MySQL 4.0,Access, Pointbase
• Application Server: Tomcat
• Web : Dreamweaver MX
• Tools: SoftIce, Ida, RefactorIt, Structural Analysis for Java