The first three students enrolled in the newly launched Italian National PhD Program in Artificial Intelligence officially joined DISI on 1st January. We warmly welcome them!
Emanuele Marconato
Supervised by prof. Andrea Passerini and dr. Stefano Teso.
Emanuele obtained the BSc in Physics from the University of Padua, with a thesis on both theoretical and experimental aspects of Quantum Mechanics. Then he moved to the University of Turin where he graduated in Physics of Complex Systems. He concluded a research fellowship at the Clarendon Laboratory (Oxford) in July 2021.
He will carry on a PhD project within the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, whose applications are intended to benefit society in the near future. For this purpose, Emanuele is conducting a study on how black-box architectures can be adapted to transparent methods, thus addressing the issues of interpretability, faithfulness and robustness for contemporary AI systems.
Bin Ren
Supervised by prof. Nicu Sebe.
Bin obtained his B.Eng. degree in the College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Central South University (China), then he received his master’s degree in computer applied technology from the School of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Peking University (China).
Bin’s Ph.D. project will explore the fusion of multiple modalities (e.g. video, audio, inertial sensors, etc.) and the design of novel cross-modal deep neural network architectures to study social behaviors, social interactions, and human activities. In addition, the project will also address the challenge of exploiting deep generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to generate video sequences depicting realistic human behaviors in a variety of social settings.
Nicola Dall'Asen
Supervised by prof. Elisa Ricci.
Nicola graduated in Data Science from the University of Trento. During his Master's degree, he fell in love with AI and Deep Learning and decided to continue this path. During his master thesis he worked on developing privacy-preserving AI algorithms for video analysis applications.
Nicola’s Ph.D. project will aim to develop novel approaches for improving the perceptual capabilities of humanoid robots in the context of social interactions with elderly patients. Specifically, the project will aim to design and implement novel deep learning architectures which enable the robot to analyze human behaviors in multi-modal multi-party interactions. Algorithms for people detection and tracking, group analysis and facial expression recognition and novel approaches to fuse visual information with other modalities (e.g. audio) will be investigated.
The University of Trento participates in the national PhD Program in Artificial Intelligence in the AI for Society area, coordinated by the University of Pisa, thanks to the scientific excellence and relevance of the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science in the field of Artificial Intelligence.