Alessandro Di Nuovo

• MSc Eng, PhD, FHEA, SMIEEE
• Professor (Full) at Sheffield Hallam University

We introduce a novel model for updating perceptual beliefs about the environment by extending the concept of Allostasis to the control of internal representations. Allostasis is a fundamental regulatory mechanism observed in animal physiology that orchestrates responses to maintain a dynamic equilibrium in bodily needs and internal states. In this...

Our current computer and AI systems are built on Neuroscience principles from almost a century ago. Recent advances in our understanding of biological computation have not crossed into computer science to catalyse advancements. We outline a multidimensional blueprint for a form of bio-inspired agent leveraging modern Neuroscience principles (includ...

Event-based vision datasets have emerged as a critical asset in advancing the capabilities of real-time perception systems, particularly in fields such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and human-computer interaction. These datasets enable low-latency processing by capturing asynchronous, pixel-level changes in the scene, providing a distinct advan...

Background Population aging affects society, with a profound impact on daily activities for those of a low socioeconomic status and with motor impairments. Social assistive robots (SARs) and monitoring technologies can improve older adults’ well-being by assisting with and monitoring home activities. Objective This study explored the opinions and...

Taking inspiration from humans can help catalyse embodied AI solutions for important real-world applications. Current human-inspired tools include neuromorphic systems and the developmental approach to learning. However, this developmental neurorobotics approach is currently lacking important frameworks for human-like computation and learning. We p...

BACKGROUND Population aging affects society, with a profound impact on daily activities for those of a low socioeconomic status and with motor impairments. Social assistive robots (SARs) and monitoring technologies can improve older adults’ well-being by assisting with and monitoring home activities. OBJECTIVE This study explored the opinions and...

Growing evidence shows the potential benefits of robot-assisted therapy for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, when developing new robotics technologies, it must be considered that this condition often causes increased anxiety in unfamiliar settings. Indeed, children with ASD have difficulties accepting changes like introducing...

Background: Numerous user-related psychological dimensions can significantly influence the dynamics between humans and robots. For developers and researchers, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of the psychometric properties of the available instruments used to assess these dimensions, as they indicate the reliability and validity...

In the past decade, interdisciplinary research has revealed the potential benefits of using social robots in the care of individuals with autism. There is a growing interest in integrating social robots into clinical practice. However, while significant efforts have been made to develop and test the technical aspects, clinical validation and implem...

BACKGROUND Numerous user-related psychological dimensions can significantly influence the dynamics between humans and robots. For developers and researchers, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of the psychometric properties of the available instruments used to assess these dimensions as they indicate the reliability and validity of...

Population ageing has profound implications for economies and societies, demanding increased health and social services. The global older adult population is steadily growing, presenting challenges. Addressing this reality, investing in older adults’ healthcare means enhancing their well-being while minimizing expenditures. Strategies aim to suppor...

This study explores the influence of teaching methods, task complexity, and user characteristics on perceptions of teachable robots. Analysis of responses from 138 participants reveals that both Teaching with Evaluative Feedback and Teaching through Preferences were perceived as equally user-friendly and easier to use compared to the non-interactiv...

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming healthcare and daily life, offering great opportunities but also posing ethical and societal challenges. To ensure AI benefits all individuals, including those with intellectual disabilities, the focus should be on adaptive technology that can adapt to the unique needs of the use...

Hand gestures are a form of non-verbal communication that is used in social interaction and it is therefore required for more natural human-robot interaction. Neuromorphic (brain-inspired) computing offers a low-power solution for Spiking neural networks (SNNs) that can be used for the classification and recognition of gestures. This article introd...

Nowadays, robots are expected to interact more physically, cognitively, and socially with people. They should adapt to unpredictable contexts alongside individuals with various behaviours. For this reason, personalisation is a valuable attribute for social robots as it allows them to act according to a specific user's needs and preferences and achi...

Nowadays, robots are expected to interact more physically, cognitively, and socially with people. They should adapt to unpredictable contexts alongside individuals with various behaviours. For this reason, personalisation is a valuable attribute for social robots as it allows them to act according to a specific user's needs and preferences and achi...

Socially assistive robots (SARs) have many potential benefits for older adults, such as reducing loneliness and assisting with healthcare interventions. However, little is known about how they are perceived by older adults. This study aimed to increase this understanding by using online, semi-structured interviews with community dwelling older adul...

Robotics and autonomous systems are reshaping the world, changing healthcare, food production and biodiversity management. While they will play a fundamental role in delivering the UN Sustainable Development Goals, associated opportunities and threats are yet to be considered systematically. We report on a horizon scan evaluating robotics and auton...

This paper makes the VISTA database, composed of inertial and visual data, publicly available for gesture and activity recognition. The inertial data were acquired with the SensHand, which can capture the movement of wrist, thumb, index and middle fingers, while the RGB-D visual data were acquired simultaneously from two different points of view, f...

The current state of the art in cognitive robotics, covering the challenges of building AI-powered intelligent robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. A novel approach to building AI-powered intelligent robots takes inspiration from the way natural cognitive systems—in humans, animals, and biological systems—develop intelligence by exploiting...

Background: Many older adults prefer to remain in their own homes for as long as possible. However, there are still questions surrounding how best to ensure that an individual can cope with autonomous living. Technological monitoring systems are an attractive solution; however, there is disagreement regarding activities of daily living (ADL) and t...

Assistive robotic systems could be a suitable solution to support a variety of health and care services, help independent living, and even simulate affection, to reduce loneliness. However, adoption is limited by several issues, as well as user concerns about ethics, data security, and privacy. Other than the common threats related to internet conn...

Modelling functionalities of the brain in human-robot interaction contexts requires a real-time understanding of how each part of a robot (motors, sensors, emotions, etc.) works and how they interact all together to accomplish complex behavioural tasks while interacting with the environment. Human brains are very efficient as they process the infor...

BACKGROUND: Rapid technological development has been opening new possibilities for children with disabilities. In particular, robots can enable and create new opportunities in therapy, rehabilitation, education, or leisure. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this article is to share experiences, challenges and learned lessons by the authors, all of them with ex...

Recent research showed the potential benefits of robot-assisted therapy in treating children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. These children often have some form of Intellectual Disability (ID) too, but this has mainly been neglected by previous robotics research. This article presents an empirical evaluation of robot-assisted imitation training, whe...

BACKGROUND Many older adults prefer to remain in their own home for as long as possible, however there are still questions surrounding how best to ensure that an individual can cope with autonomous living. Technological monitoring systems are an attractive solution, but there is disagreement relating to Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and the opt...

The recognition of human gestures is crucial for improving the quality of human-robot cooperation. This article presents a system composed of a Pepper robot that mounts an RGB-D camera and an inertial device called SensHand. The system acquired data from twenty people who performed five daily living activities (i.e. Having Lunch, Personal Hygiene,...

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) requires not only technical safety but also a level of comfort for humans to ensure that humans and robots work and interact safely in the daily process flow. This paper presents a review of preliminary design considerations on how a robot arm can be controlled to explore various safe and personified movements in ord...

We present a novel, hybrid approach for clustering text databases. We use a genetic algorithm to generate and evolve a set of single word search queries in Apache Lucene format. Clusters are formed as the set of documents matching a search query. The queries are optimized to maximize the number of documents returned and to minimize the overlap betw...

Purpose of Review Understanding and manipulating abstract concepts is a fundamental characteristic of human intelligence that is currently missing in artificial agents. Without it, the ability of these robots to interact socially with humans while performing their tasks would be hindered. However, what is needed to empower our robots with such a ca...

Numerical cognition is a fundamental component of human intelligence that has not been fully understood yet. Indeed, it is a subject of research in many disciplines, e.g., neuroscience, education, cognitive and developmental psychology, philosophy of mathematics, linguistics. In Artificial Intelligence, aspects of numerical cognition have been mode...

In the last few decades, various studies demonstrated numerous robotics applications that can tackle the problem of the ageing population by supporting older people to live longer and independently at home. This article reviews the scientific literature and highlights how social robots can help the daily life of older people and be useful also as a...

The use of technology has been suggested as a means of allowing continued autonomous living for older adults, while reducing the burden on caregivers and aiding decision-making relating to healthcare. However, more clarity is needed relating to the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) rec-ognised, and the types of technology included within current mon...

In this paper, a novel neuro-robotics model capable of counting real items is introduced. The model allows us to investigate the interaction between embodiment and numerical cognition. This is composed of a deep neural network capable of image processing and sequential tasks performance, and a robotic platform providing the embodiment—the iCub huma...

In the last decade, numerous research studies showed that robots can be suitable assistants in the care and treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Still, more investigation is required to fully assess the introduction of robotics assistants, as the majority of the studies was limited in numbers of participants and scope, e.g. by...

Negli ultimi anni gli studi sulla Human-Robot Interaction si sono focalizzati anche sull'utilizzo della Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR). Questa favorisce l'assistenza all'utente in un ambiente sociale interattivo dove il robot umanoide dà istruzioni e feedback, svolgendo il ruolo di trainer e monitorando contemporaneamente i progressi del trattam...

The Controlled Autonomous Robot for Early detection and Rehabilitation of Autism and Intellectual Disability (CARER-AID) project aimed at verifying the effects of the introduction of a humanoid robot in the clinical routine as a supervised autonomous assistant to support clinical staff in the care of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)...

In this paper, a novel neuro-robotics model capable of counting real items is introduced. The model allows us to investigate the interaction between embodiment and numerical cognition. This is composed of a deep neural network capable of image processing and sequential tasks performance, and a robotic platform providing the embodiment - the iCub hu...

Research and development in socially assistive robotics have produced several novel applications in the care of senior people. However, some are still unexplored such as their use as psychometric tools allowing for a quick and dependable evaluation of human users’ intellectual capacity. To fully exploit the application of a social robot as a psycho...

Robots are versatile devices that are promising tools for supporting teaching and learning in the classroom or at home. In fact, robots can be engaging and motivating, especially for young children. This paper presents an experimental study with 81 kindergarten children on memorizations of two tales narrated by a humanoid robot. Variables of the st...

Developmental psychology and neuroimaging research identified a close link between numbers and fingers, which can boost the initial number knowledge in children. Recent evidence shows that a simulation of the children's embodied strategies can improve the machine intelligence too. This article explores the application of embodied strategies to conv...

This short report presents a small-scale explorative study about children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) interaction with robots during clinical interactions. This is part of an ongoing project, which aims at defining a robotic service for supporting children with developmental disabilities and increase the efficiency of routine procedures tha...

Human factors and human-centred design philosophy are highly desired in today’s robotics applications such as human-robot interaction (HRI). Several studies showed that endowing robots of human-like interaction skills can not only make them more likeable but also improve their performance. In particular, skill transfer by imitation learning can inc...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a multifaceted developmental disorder that comprises a mixture of social impairments, with deficits in many areas including the theory of mind, imitation, and communication. Moreover, people with autism have difficulty in recognising and understanding emotional expressions. We are currently working on integrating a...

In the last decades, various researches in the field of robotics have created numerous opportunities for innovative support of the older population. The goal of this work was to review and highlight how social robots can help the daily life of older people, and be useful also as assessment tools. We will underline the aspects of usability and accep...

Number knowledge can be boosted initially by embodied strategies such as the use of fingers. This Article explores the perceptual process of grounding number symbols in artificial agents, particularly the iCub robot—a child-like humanoid with fully functional, five-fingered hands. It studies the application of convolutional neural network models in...

Despite general scepticism from care professionals, social robotics research is providing evidence of successful application in education and rehabilitation in clinical psychology practice. In this article, we investigate the cultural influences of English and Italian psychology students in the perception of usefulness and intention to use a robot...

This short paper describes an approach for collecting a dataset of hand’s pictures and training a Deep Learning network that could enable the iCub robot to count on its fingers using solely its own cameras. Such a skill, mimicking children’s habits, can support arithmetic learning in a baby robot, an important step in creating artificial intelligen...

Social interaction, especially for older people living alone is a challenge currently facing human-robot interaction (HRI). There has been little research on user preference towards HRI interfaces. In this paper, we took both objective observations and participants’ opinions into account in studying older users with a robot partner. The developed d...

In this paper, we present neuro-robotics models with a deep artificial neural network capable of generating finger counting positions and number estimation. We first train the model in an unsupervised manner where each layer is treated as a Restricted Boltzmann Machine or an autoencoder. Such a model is further trained in a supervised way. This typ...

Technological advances are increasing the range of applications for artificial intelligence, especially through its embodiment within humanoid robotics platforms. This promotes the development of novel systems for automated screening of neurological conditions to assist the clinical practitioners in the detection of early signs of mild cognitive im...

Thanks to recent technological improvements that enable novel applications beyond the industrial context, there is growing interest in the use of robots in everyday life situations. To improve the acceptability of personal service robots, they should seamlessly interact with the users, understand their social signals and cues and respond appropriat...

This abstract presents a preliminary evaluation of the usability of a novel system for cognitive testing, which is based on the multimodal interfaces of the social robot "Pepper" and the IBM cloud AI "Watson". Thirty-six participants experienced the system without assistance and filled the System Usability Scale questionnaire. Results show that the...

Possible applications of robots are growing in educational contexts, where they can support and enhance the traditional learning at any level, including kindergarten. However, the acceptance of such novel technology among the kids is not fully understood, especially for the youngest ones. In this abstract, we present an experiment that investigates...

Numerical cognition is a distinctive component of human intelligence such that the observation of its practice provides a window in high-level brain function. The modelling of numerical abilities in artificial cognitive systems can help to confirm existing child development hypotheses and define new ones by means of computational simulations. Meanw...

Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence and social robotics, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) can be used as a non-invasive screening tool for the assessment of cognitive decline. In this scenario, the robot manages the assessment by providing the instructions to the patient, registering his/her answers and objectively calculating the...

It is well established that robots can be suitable assistants in the care and treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, the majority of the research focuses on stand-alone interventions, high-functioning individuals and the success is evaluated via qualitative analysis of videos recorded during the interaction. In this pap...

Robot-Assisted Therapy is a very promising form of intervention for the treatment children with autism, who show a preference for robots as a tutor. Autism often comorbid with intellectual disability and this condition requires intelligent machines fully adaptable to the peculiar needs of the child. One of the impairments of children with autism an...

Mathematical competence can endow robots with the necessary capability for abstract and symbolic processing, which is required for higher cognitive functions such as natural language understanding. But, so far, only few attempts have been made to model mathematical cognition in robots. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the Long-Shor...

Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence and social robot-ics, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) can be used as a non-invasive screening tool for the assessment of cognitive decline. In this scenario, the robot manages the assessment by providing the instructions to the patient, registering his/her answers and objectively calculating th...

Recent studies suggest that some children with autism prefer robots as tutors for improving their social interaction and communication abilities which are impaired due to their disorder. Indeed, research has focused on developing a very promising form of intervention named Robot-Assisted Therapy. This area of intervention poses many challenges, inc...

Robots are increasingly being used outside of controlled environments (e.g., factory floors or research labs) and in more complex, social shared-spaces, such as exhibitions events, care-homes, or in schools. In these environments, people may need to learn robots’ behaviours to accommodate them; across the long-term, people may habituate towards rob...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental disorder that requires personalising the treatment to the personal condition, in particular for individuals with Intellectual Disability (ID), which are the majority of those with ASD. In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis of our on-going research on personalised care for children...

In this paper, we present our ongoing research on robots as a screening tool for potential cognitive impairment, a risk factor for dementia and other mental diseases. We implemented a psy-chometric test on a state-of-the-art social robot, realizing a cog-nitive assessment via Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and we compared it to the traditional pape...

Background In Europe, the population of older people is increasing rapidly. Many older people prefer to remain in their homes but living alone could be a risk for their safety. In this context, robotics and other emerging technologies are increasingly proposed as potential solutions to this societal concern. However, one-third of all assistive tech...

Socially assistive robotic platforms are now a realistic option for the long-term care of ageing populations. Elderly users may benefit from many services provided by robots operating in different environments, such as providing assistance inside apartments, serving in shared facilities of buildings or guiding people outdoors. In this paper, we pre...

This paper presents an embodied model for recognition of handwritten digits in a cognitive developmental robot scenario. Inspired by neuro-psychological data, the model integrates three modules: a stacked auto-encoder network to process the visual information, a feedforward neural controller for the fingers, and a generalized regression network tha...

Recent research demonstrated the benefits of employing robots as therapeutic assistants and caregivers, but very little is known on the use of robots as a tool for psychological assessment. Socially capable robots can provide many advantages to diagnostic practice: engage people, guarantee standardized administration and assessor neutrality, perfor...

In this paper, we present a study on the influence of different social behavior on preschool children’s perception of stories narrated either by a humanoid robot or by a human teacher. Four conditions were considered: static human, static robot, expressive human and expressive robot. Two stories, with knowledge and emotional content, were narrated...

A current challenge for artificial cognitive systems is to acquire the capability to freely interact with humans in such a way that the burden of learning and adaptation lies with the machine and not with the human. This special issue presents a variety of recent developments in artificial cognitive agents, embedded in human-centric environments, w...

Research in the area of robotics has made avail- able numerous possibilities for further innovation in the education of children, especially in the rehabilitation of those with learning difficulties and/or intellectual disabilities. Despite the scientific evidence, there is still a strong scepticism against the use of robots in the fields of educat...

This chapter is focused on discussing the concept of mental imagery as a fundamental cognitive capability to enhance the performance of cognitive robots . Indeed, the emphasis will be on the embodied imagery mechanisms applied to build artificial cognitive models of motor imagery and mental simulation to control complex behaviors of humanoid platfo...