I'm currently an Assistant Professor (RTDb) at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Verona and Associate Researcher of the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology (ISTC-CNR). Previously I was Post-Doc Research Fellow at the University of Verona, at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology of the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (ISTC-CNR) in Trento, and earlier at the Measurement Instrumentation and Robotics Group of the University of Trento running the individual PAT-EU Cofund Marie Curie Action project ABILE.

I'm a Mechatronics Engineer graduated at the University of Trento and I took my PhD from the University of Padua. My background is in Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Robotics. I co-authored more than 50 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences. I'm member of the Editorial Board of Cognitive Processing journal, and I serve as reviewer for top ranked journals and conferences like Computer Vision and Image Understanding, CVPR, ICCV, ICPR, ICRA, IROS, IJCAI, and ACM Multimedia. I co-founded two start-up companies: one working on robotics and mechatronics (Robosense S.r.l.) and one on high-tech instrumentations for sports and fitness (Libon S.r.l.).

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My current research interest are divided into three main topics: Social Signal Processing (Group Detection), Ontologies (Ontology-driven Computer Vision) and Crowd Analysis (Spectators Crowd)

Group detection

Find groups of interacting people from still images by exploiting the sociological concept of F-formation. Have a look at the project page, where you can also download code and datasets.

Ontology-driven Computer Vision

Merge Knowledge Representation, Semantics and Ontologies with Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition techniques. The main focus is on automatically generating training sets for object recognition tasks.

Spectators Crowd

Perform crowd analysis on spectators crowds, i.e. the audience of an entertainment event like sport, talks, theater, etc.. Have a look at our CVPR paper and the project page.