About
I am a KTP Associate at Middlesex University in London and I am currently working at the Global NoticeBoard project. I am enrolled in a Master by Research within the School of Science and Technology at Middlesex with topic “Software Architectures and Applications of Machine Learning to Support Social Inclusion, a project in collaboration with Caritas Anchor House”.
Before joining Middlesex University in 2015, I have obtained my BSc and MSc in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in Italy.
My Master’s Thesis is entitled “People Detection and Tracking from a Small-footprint Mobile Ground Robot using an RGB-D Sensor” and deals with the problem of robustly detecting people on a cluttered environment from an unusual and difficult point of view, where the legs are the most prominent feature. Our machine learning based, real-time, open-source, ROS-enabled system solves the person detection problem significantly better than alternative approaches, even in challenging scenarios with multiple people in view at once and occluding each other. The system has been deployed on two real robots: Turtlebot, a small wheeled commercial robot supplied to us by the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA - Lugano, Switzerland), and StarlETH, a small quadruped robot developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH - Zurich, Switzerland). Preliminary results of this research project have been presented in a video at the “ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2014 - HRI” and a paper has been presented at the “IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2014 - IROS” (http://bit.ly/perceivingpeople).