I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Engineering “Enzo Ferrari” of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where I work in the AImageLab research group led by Prof. Rita Cucchiara. I am a member of the ELLIS Society and the ACM.

My research asks how machines can perceive people the way people perceive each other: where we look, what we feel and what our bodies reveal without contact. I work on gaze and scanpath prediction, facial expression and affect analysis, and remote measurement of heart rate and respiration from ordinary video, increasingly within multimodal and vision-language models. My current research focuses on the intersection of these areas, aiming to develop more robust and human-like perception systems.

I received my Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences from the University of Milan in 2017, where I was a founding member of the PHuSe Lab. Before that, I was an interaction developer at the Milan design studio dotdotdot, building interactive installations at the meeting point of architecture, design and technology. That work led to a patent and to my first research collaborations on perceptual computing and visual attention.