Profile

I am originally from Italy, but in Ireland long enough (since 10/10/2010) to feel very much at home. I lived in Galway for a few years but moved to Dublin in 2018. I used to perform as a lead rock singer in a band in my spare time before I moved to Ireland (and before I became a mum!), and I am recently back to having an acoustic piano at home to practice.
I love the sun, the sea. As most italians, I enjoy cooking and eating good food (no Domino’s thanks!) and I prepare most meals from scratch at home, which I think has spoiled my loved ones quite a bit! I am a mum of two very smart and very stubborn girls… they take it after me as my husband is the typical patient, sensitive, calm Irish man (it’ll all be grand!).
Some people think I have been very lucky in life. I think luck goes to whoever grabs it and creates their own opportunities. My motto is “you can do it!”.

Think about the way babies learn things when they are as young as 2 years old: to say new words, to name objects in pictures, to answer simple questions. Even tasks that seem trivial to you like building legos, color an image, understand if a toy is broken by just looking at it… As we grow up we learn more complex things: we learn to drive, to cook, to speak different languages, … We also study, we practice, so if we are doctors, we can visit a patient and figure out whether there is a problem, if we are linguists we can understand and translate entire books into different languages, if we are firefighters we can respond to emergencies and understand danger,… All these things take a lot of time to learn. What if I tell you that computers, robots, machines can learn how to do these things and sometimes do them faster and better than us? This is what my research work is about: help creating intelligent machines that can learn things the way we learn, but faster. They won’t be able to replace us, but they could help a doctor, understand people feelings by looking at them, drive a car, go into space, translate books into different languages, anticipate danger, and much more. They could also create paintings, music and any other form of art. A machine like that can also answer almost any type of question (because they “know” things). One challenge is that most computer programmes able to do these things are not yet as clever as we are: they are not as good as explaining things as their reasoning ability is hidden into complex mathematical and statistical formulas. So I also work on making sure these programmes can work for and with humans, so when you ask “why?”, they can answer that too!

I regularly follow up progress of my research students and status of the research projects I am working on (experiments results, interesting collaboration opportunities and so on). I often have to lead research ideas of my own, think about how new problems can be solved with technology, and to do that well I have to interact with others outside of my discipline (medical doctors, psychologists, artists, city authorities, environmental experts etc.): when you try and solve a problem for somebody, you need to make sure you know from them all you need to find the right solution!

My office looks like this:

This is the entrance to the building where I work, on a sunny day in spring:

And this is the typical classroom where I teach:

Many times I would have liked to create short animated movie clips to be made available online for school kids to understand what my work is about. But it is too time consuming and I do not know how to create good animated videos. I am sure many of my colleagues, like me, can picture in their head what they would show in a cartoon but they have no time and skills to actually do it. With the money I would like to have a special team working with some of the engineers and scientists I know to create those cartoons.