Dimitri Ognibene

Dimitri Ognibene, PhD, has joined University of Essex as Lecturer in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in October 2017. In February 2015 he received from University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) and FP7 Marie Curie Actions COFUND Grants Programme a UPFellows Research Grant worth €150k awarded to one winner over more than one hundred participants on the topic of Embodied Bounded Rational Agents, focusing on the development of algorithms for intelligent social agents with bounded computational and sensory resources. Before he has been developing algorithms for active vision in industrial robotic tasks as a Research Associate (RA) at Centre for Robotics Research, Kings College London; devising Bayesian methods and robotic models for attention in social and dynamic environments as a RA at the Personal Robotics Laboratory in Imperial College London. During his PhD he studied the interaction between active vision and autonomous learning in neuro-robotic models at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the Italian Research Council (ISTC CNR). He also collaborated with Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (UCL) to address the exploration issue in Predictive Coding, the currently dominant neurocomputational modelling paradigm. Dr Ognibene has also been Visiting Researcher at Bounded Resource Reasoning Laboratory in UMass and at University of Reykjavik (Iceland) exploring the symmetries between active sensor control and active computation or metareasoning. Dr Ognibene presented his work in several international conferences on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), adaptation (SAB), and development (ICDL) and published on international peer-reviewed journals. Dr Ognibene was invited to speak at the International Symposium for Attention in Cognitive Systems (2013 and 2014) as well as in other various neuroscience, robotics and machine-learning international venues. In 2017, he organised a workshop on Active Vision in Human Robot Collaboration at ICIAP2017. Dr Ognibene is Associate Editor of Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics, Review Editor for Frontiers in Bionics and Biomimetics, and has been part of the Program Committee of several international conferences and symposiums.

Affiliation: Dimitri Ognibene, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK

List of Relevant Publications:

• Friston, K., Rigoli, F., Ognibene, D., Mathys, C., Fitzgerald, T., & Pezzulo, G. (2015). Active inference and epistemic value. Cognitive neuroscience, 6(4), 187-214.
• Lee, K., Ognibene, D., Chang, H. J., Kim, T. K., & Demiris, Y. (2015). Stare: Spatio-temporal attention relocation for multiple structured activities detection. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(12), 5916-5927.
• Ognibene, D., & Baldassare, G. (2015). Ecological active vision: Four bioinspired principles to integrate bottom–up and adaptive top–down attention tested with a simple camera-arm robot. IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 7(1), 3-25.
• Ognibene, D., & Demiris, Y. (2013, August). Towards Active Event Recognition. In IJCAI (pp. 2495-2501).
• Ognibene, D., Chinellato, E., Sarabia, M., & Demiris, Y. (2013). Contextual action recognition and target localization with an active allocation of attention on a humanoid robot. Bioinspiration & biomimetics, 8(3), 035002.