I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Information Technology of Uppsala University where I am part of the Uppsala Social Robotics Lab directed by Prof. Ginevra Castellano. My background is multidisciplinary. I received a BA in Literature and Linguistics from the University of Roma Tre (Rome, Italy) in 2011, a MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Siena (Siena, Italy) in 2013, and an Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Interactive and Cognitive Environments (ICE) – with a specialization in Assistive Technologies – from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC; Barcelona, Spain) and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e; Eindhoven, Netherlands) in 2018.
My doctoral project – ENGAGE-DEM: A Model of Engagement of People with Dementia – was aimed at building a model of engagement of people with dementia during interactions with social robots by means of nonverbal behavior and psychophysiology (e.g., electrodermal activity).
My postdoctoral fellowship is funded by the Equal Opportunities Group of the Information Technology Department. As a postdoc, I am part of the SSF COIN project, “Co-adaptive human-robot interactive systems”, a project funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) and held in collaboration with KTH (PIs: Ginevra Castellano (UU), Danica Kragic (KTH), Gabriel Skantze (KTH), and Dimos Dimarogonas (KTH)). For this project, I am constructing and testing novel paradigms and models of human-robot co-adaptation to apply to educational settings. Moreover, I am also involved in the WASP-HS project “The Ethics of Caring Robots”, a collaboration with Linköping University (PIs: Ginevra Castellano (UU), Ericka Johnson (LiU), and Katherine Harrison (LiU)). For this project, I am analyzing the process of gendering social robots in the HRI community. More recently, I received funding as CO-PI for a doctoral project funded by the WOMHeR (Women’s Mental Health during the Reproductive Lifespan) Centre, focused on robot-assisted diagnosis of women’s depression around childbirth.
I am also co-supervising the doctoral project of Natalia Calvo-Barajas, which focuses on modeling trust in human-robot interaction, and actively collaborating with Maike Paetzel in several studies regarding users’ perceptions of social robots’ uncanniness, facial mimicry of robot’s emotions, and design and personality attribution to robots.
Together with Prof. Robin Strand (head of VI2 division), Prof. Åsa Cajander (deputy head of division), and Dr. Ginevra Castellano, I am also co-organizing a series of events within our division to promote wellbeing in the work environment, which are funded through the WONDER project (you can find more about the project at this link).