Short Bio

Luca Pallonetto is a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. He conducts his doctoral research at PAL Robotics in Barcelona, in collaboration with the University of Naples Federico II. His research explores how robots can acquire and express social awareness by learning compact and semantically meaningful representations of social environments. Through the study of social dynamics and human–robot interactions, his work aims to enable robots to perceive, interpret, and adapt to human behavior in real-world contexts.

Topic

This project targets two main research objectives: (1) how to build compact, yet semantics-preserving, embeddings to represent arbitrary social environments; how to fully characterize these embeddings, including their latent semantics; (2) precisely frame the socio-cognitive skill of social awareness enabled by social embeddings, and demonstrate it on social robots. The DC will particularly focus on social dynamics, by characterizing the trajectories of on-going social situations in the embedding space; discontinuities in the embedding space, that might represent unexpected changes of social dynamics; and social situation predictions, by extrapolating trajectories in the embedding space.

Host Institution:PAL Robotics SL – Barcelona, Spain

PhD Enrollment: Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

PI: Dr. Severin Lemaignan