Lorenzo Cominelli

Lorenzo Cominelli received the Master Degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2014 and the Ph.D. in Automation, Robotics and Biomedical Engineering in 2018, both at the University of Pisa. Currently, he is a Technologist of the Information Engineering Dept. (DII) working in collaboration with the “E. Piaggio” Research Center. His research is focused on AI and Cognitive Systems for Social Robotics. He was responsible for the design and development of the FACE Robot Cognitive System, and he is working on the development of a new humanoid robot designed in collaboration with the Animatronics' guru Gustav Hoegen, from Biomimic Studio. SEAI (Social Emotional Artificial Intelligence) is the cognitive system he developed. It is inspired by several well-known theories of neuroscience and it has been implemented with a mixed knowledge-based and data-driven approach. SEAI processes raw incoming data gathered from the robot's sensors in order to deduce high-level information on the state of the robot, on its social context, until to the virtual emotional states invoked by this context. Decisions are taken following these reasoning chains and the robot's behaviour is driven by its synthetic emotional parameters. The goal is to represent emotions and feelings in an artificial intelligence and test their influence on the behavior of social robots and their human interlocutors. Merging his interest in music and visual arts, he has also been involved in the usage and customization of expressive robots in the show business, such as the participations in movies, theater shows and, recently, the RobotOpera, the world's first lyric opera in which a robot sang and acted together with human actors. Since 2018, he is co-teacher of Social Robotics and Affective Computing, a course of the Bionics Engineering program at the University of Pisa.