Motivation

In a nutshell, I am a computer scientist who is extremely interested in Psychology. I am passionate about how do we humans engage socially with other humans, and how we attribute to others social characteristics, emotional states and intends relying on visual cues: How can we recognize emotions from visual cues and teach this to a computer? Does my cultural background affect how I express my emotions? How is language related to our perception of body shape? Are there perceptual differences in our perception of human bodies affecting our eating habits? Do my political views affect how I judge others in first encounters?. I am interested in understanding, modeling and synthesizing these social effects. How can we teach all these things to the computer? I am particularly interested in the role individual differences (personality traits, cultural background, spoken languages, political views, etc.) play in our social life: perception, cognition and action. Up to this point in my academic career, I have been working with these questions starting from a technical perspective: I have been designing experiments to collect behavioral and perceptual data from participants both in the laboratory and online and modeling them using computer graphics and machine learning techniques. I believe Internet research is essential in order to collect data from participants who hold very different individual characteristics. As an example, you can see here a video of the methodology and results of a study I carried out online, applying crowdsourcing techniques, to investigate the relationship between body perception and language. Currently, I am working - also online - on a cross-cultural study of the same question.

My background is strongly technical, however, in the last decade I gained substantial experience in psychological research methods ranging from data collection, experimental design, human participant ethics to statistics. Given my general research directions in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML), I am also very interested in studying and performing research on the validity of the data with which we, computer scientists, attempt to train computational models. The biases found, due to the online data collection methods currently in use, have just started to arise, and it will be very helpful to the field to have a set of guidelines and good practices on internet research and data collection for ML. I am looking forward to working on my "Habilitation" and it would be an amazing chance for me to do this within the iScience group.

What I can offer to iScience:

• Vast knowledge and experience on web-development, interactive and 3D online development, visualization, programming, and computational modeling.
• Development of novel experimental paradigms (web based, virtual reality, physiology, etc.)
• My international, interdisciplinary network of collaborators
• Training in web programming (as well as general programming and machine learning) to students, group members and others
• Support on the mentoring of students and administrative tasks of the lab
• Multilingual experience and experience with cross-cultural research
• A fresh perspective from a person coming from a different field, background and culture
• A friendly, highly motivated and quick learning team member

What I would love to get from my prospective experience in iScience:

• Formalization of my knowledge in behavioral and psychological research
• Exposure to a variety of research topics in Psychology
• Collaboration with peers with deep knowledge of online research methods
• The chance to do Habilitation in the field of psychology within the framework of online research

Thanks in advance for reading my application. I am very excited about the opportunity of joining your group and I am happy to provide any further information that you may deem necessary. I work daily in the University (office Z715), and I am available for face-to-face conversations right away if my profile is of interest to you!

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 Relevant Skills

Strong web development background
Vast experience in multiple languages and tools: Python, PhP, mysql, javascript, ruby on rails, etc.
Three-dimensional web development (webgl, threejs). I developed a new web-tool, where body shape, social perception and language can be linked together. The tool can be explored on the website I developed: Body Talk. Notice that the body is a 3D component: it can be rotated and morphed in real-time in the browser. Currently, this tool is being used in Germany and Italy for the investigation of the perception of patients with eating disorders.
Internet-based research
Crowdsourcing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Cross-cultural studies
Experimental behavioral research
Emotion elicitation, Social perception, Body perception, Individual factors
Experience with clinical populations (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa)
Strong programming and computational modeling skills in general

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 Spoken languages

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