The field of biologically inspired robotics is definitely my main research interest. In particular, the idea of using robots in order to understand real biological systems is the common background of my studies. The ECCEROBOT project, in which I am personally involved, it is a great opportunity to go in deep about human locomotion system: it is amazing the way we coordinate our muscle activations in order to perform very complex movements. Indeed the goal of the project is to control an anthropomimetic robot, i.e. its structure approximately replicates the inner structure of human body with the equivalents of compliant muscles, tendons, bones and joints, rather than rigid materials and stiff actuators.

Collaborating with the "Politecnico di Milano", I am also working on Affective Computing. The main question is: "Could an artificial agent recognize the emotion of the subject which it is interacting with?". According to some recent researches, each affective state produces a specific biological activation, also called autonomic activation; so, our approach is the statistical analysis of the subjet's biological signals.

Both projects belong to the new vision of robotics. "New Robotics is going to be human-centered, i.e., robots will work with humans in normal human environments. [...] Given that in a dynamic environment collisions with the environment are unavoidable, compliant control seems to be crucial. [...] Engagement research tries to understand what it takes to keep humans interested when interacting with a robot [...]: understand motivation and emotions of humans in an automatic way, and, of course, create robot behaviors in the New Robotics that relate to those characteristic of human personalities" (Stefan Schaal).

• FS 2009: Teaching Assistant in "Neural Networks". Lecture given by Dr. Prof. Rolf Pfeifer. University of Zurich.
• HS 2009: Teaching Assistant in "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence". Lecture given by Dr. Prof. Rolf Pfeifer in the context of the  ShanghAI Lectures. University of Zurich.
• FS 2010: Teaching Assistant in "Artificial Life". Lecture given by Dr. Ruedi Füchslin. University of Zurich.

I started to love Science a long time ago. Because of the my huge amount of (scientific-related) interests, I had a lot of troubles in deciding my specific field of study: Computer Engineering, with its massive applicability, it was the best trade-off between real-world applictions and the pure Physics or Mathematics. I got my bachelor degree at the University of Catania in 2005. Fascinated by my thesis about "Spiking Neural Networks" and my personal redings I decided to move to Milan; at the "Politecnico di Milano" I had indeed the pleasure to attend the "Master of Science in Engineering of Computing Systems", with major in Artificial Intelligence. My master thesis, defended in 2008, was about Software Engineering for Robotics; in particular I developed a framework for quantitatively comparing software architectures for robot control at the functional level. The experience in Milan enhanced my personal predilection and it became clear the desire to work actively in Science. So, after six months at the "Politecnico di Milano" as a research co-worker in Affective Computing topics, I applied for my PhD here at the University of Zurich.