Carlo Mazzola

Carlo Mazzola is PhD Student Fellow at the Italian Institute of Technology in the unit Cognitive Architectures for Collaborative Technologies (CONTACT), where he works for the EU-funded twinning-project TERAIS (Towards Excellent Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at a Slovak university). He received his B.S. and M.S. in Philosophy at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano (Italy) and graduated after a period at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Germany) with a thesis about the role of imagination and empathy in perception. After a period as Visiting Scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in the CONTACT unit, in which he explored mechanisms of social perception in HRI, in 2019 he started his Ph.D. in the same institute in the unit Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences (RBCS), in which he has studied perceptual mechanisms related to Shared Perception on humans and developed Shared Perception abilities on the humanoid robot iCub by applying DL models to Human-Robot Interaction. In general, Shared Perception includes any mechanism humans use when they gather what they perceive of the environment with what others perceive. Humans are able to integrate their perception with others' intentionality toward the same thing. This enhances the perception of the world and allows collaboration. In this sense, Shared Perception is a fundamental ability to foster a more natural and effective human-robot interaction.