Francesco Vigni
/franˈt͡ʃe.sko ˈvi.ɲi/ -
he/him why?
I spend my time exploring the world of robots, their brains (AI) and their impact on our societies. I study how robots can learn to interact in a human-like way. The future expects robots to be able to interact with humans spontaneously and somebody has to make it happen ;).
On this website, I collect some of my works and interests.
PhD Thesis
10 Feb, 2025
I defended my PhD thesis titled The Unscripted Encounter: Social Cues for Spontaneous Human-Robot Interactions for the fulfilment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information and Communication Technology for Health at Università degli studi di Napoli Federico II in Naples, Italy.
01 Feb, 2025
I joined the Young Leaders Committee of the International Conference on Social Robotics + AI (icsr25+ai) that will take place in Naples, Italy on September 2025.
27 Jan, 2025
26 May, 2024
The work Too Close to You? A Study on Emotion-Adapted Proxemics Behaviours has been accepted for presentation at the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2024) in Pasadena, California.
26 May, 2024
The work Are Emotions Important? A Study on Social Distances for Path Planning based on Emotions has been accepted for presentation at the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2024) in Pasadena, California.
22 Mar, 2024
The highschool Istituto Salesiano Sacro Cuore in Napoli, Italia invited me to give a talk titled: "Datemi un bit e solleverò il mondo" focused on the implication of Robotics and AI in the future of our societies. Around 200 students attended the talk and actively participated in the discussion. The event took place in the Teatro Auditorium Salesiano Salvo D'Acquisto.
09 Mar, 2024
The second edition of our workshop WARN: Weighting the benefits of Autonomous Robot persoNalization has been accepted for inclusion in the 33rd IEEE RO-MAN 2024 conference in Pasadena California, USA.
10 Feb, 2024
I was hosted at the Autonomous Systems Lab at the Technische Universitaet Wien (TUW) in Vienna, Austria, where I worked on developing non-verbal intuitive behaviours for first encounters with social robots as a visiting researcher for a five-month period.
10 Jan, 2024
The work A Rosbag Tool to Improve Dataset Reliability has been accepted as Late Breaking Report at the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2024) in Boulder Colorado, USA.