Tommaso Apicella

I am a PostDoc in the PAVIS group at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). The main focus of my research activity is the design of computer vision models that enable robots to explore and interact with objects or people in the environment.

Before joining IIT, I was a PhD student in Interactive and Cognitive Environments, a joint Doctorate between University of Genoa and Queen Mary University of London. The main topic of my PhD research was Affordance Segmentation that identifies the surfaces of potential interaction between an agent (e.g. a robotic hand) and an object relying only on visual information. The exciting and fascinating aspect of Affordance Segmentation is the connection to robotic and prosthetic applications, enabling assistive technologies (e.g., grasping, object manipulation) or collaborative human-robot scenarios.