Giovanni Saponaro

Collaborators

Position: Ph.D. Student

tp.aobsilu.ocincet.rsi@oranopasg

Phone :+351-218418050

Office: 7.26

I've received a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal in 2019. Previously, I also received a BSc degree in Computer Engineering and an MSc degree (honors) in Computer Engineering–Artificial Intelligence Systems from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. My research interests include visual scene understanding and robot decision algorithms that support human–robot interaction. I also participated in the international research project POETICON++, together with linguists, computer vision experts, neuroscientists, and roboticists. I've been publishing in the diverse areas of cognitive systems, developmental robotics, visual perception of objects and of human body gestures for action recognition. I'm currently a Computer Vision Software Engineer at Eyeware, developing software for eye tracking.

Projects

Publications

Journal Papers

[1] Giovanni Saponaro, Lorenzo Jamone, Alexandre Bernardino, Giampiero Salvi, "Beyond the Self: Using Grounded Affordances to Interpret and Describe Others’ Actions", IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS), Vol. 12, Issue 2, pp 209-221, June, 2020

Conference Papers

[1] Alexandre Antunes, Giovanni Saponaro, A. Morse, Lorenzo Jamone, José Santos-Victor, A. Cangelosi, "Learn, Plan, Remember: A Developmental Robot Architecture for Task Solving", Proc. of IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2017 - 7th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017

[2] Giovanni Saponaro, Pedro Vicente, Atabak Dehban, Lorenzo Jamone, Alexandre Bernardino, José Santos-Victor, "Learning at the Ends: From Hand to Tool Affordances in Humanoid Robots", Proc. of IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 2017 - 7th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017

[3] Giovanni Saponaro, Lorenzo Jamone, Alexandre Bernardino, Giampiero Salvi, "Interactive Robot Learning of Gestures, Language and Affordances", Proc. of GLU 2017 - International Workshop on Grounding Language Understanding, Stockholm, Sweden, 2017

[4] Alexandre Antunes, Lorenzo Jamone, Giovanni Saponaro, Alexandre Bernardino, Rodrigo Ventura, "From Human Instructions to Robot Actions: Formulation of Goals, Affordances and Probabilistic Planning", Proc. of ICRA 2016 - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Stockholm, Sweden, 2016

[5] Lorenzo Jamone, Giovanni Saponaro, Alexandre Antunes, Rodrigo Ventura, Alexandre Bernardino, José Santos-Victor, "Learning object affordances for tool use and problem solving in cognitive robots", AIRO 2015 - 2nd Italian Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Ferrara, Italy, 2015

[6] Afonso Goncalves, Giovanni Saponaro, Lorenzo Jamone, Alexandre Bernardino, "Learning Visual Affordances of Objects and Tools through Autonomous Robot Exploration", Proc. of ICARSC 2014 - IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions, Espinho, Portugal, 2014 - PDF

[7] Afonso Goncalves, J. Abrantes, Giovanni Saponaro, Lorenzo Jamone, Alexandre Bernardino, "Learning Intermediate Object Affordances: Towards the Development of a Tool Concept", Proc. of IEEE ICDL - EPIROB 2014, The 4th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics, Genoa, Italy, 2014

[8] Afonso Goncalves, Lorenzo Jamone, Giovanni Saponaro, Alexandre Bernardino, "Autonomous Learning of Tool Affordances", Proc. of RecPad 2013 - 19th edition of the Portuguese Conference on Pattern Recognition, Lisbon, Portugal, 2013 - PDF

[9] Giovanni Saponaro, Giampiero Salvi, Alexandre Bernardino, "Robot Anticipation of Human Intentions through Continuous Gesture Recognition", Proc. of CR-HRI 2013 - 4th International Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Human Robot Interaction, San Diego, USA, 2013 - PDF

[10] Giovanni Saponaro, "Generation of meaningful robot expressions with active learning", Proc. of HRI 2011 - 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2011 - PDF

[11] Giovanni Saponaro, "Bootstrapping Visual Memories for a Humanoid Robot", Proc. of RecPad 2009 - 15th edition of the Portuguese Conference on Pattern Recognition, Aveiro, Portugal, 2009

[12] Giovanni Saponaro, "Pose Estimation for Grasping Preparation from Stereo Ellipses", Proc. of CLAWAR 2008 - Workshop on Humanoid Robotics, Coimbra, Portugal, 2008

PhD Theses

[1] Giovanni Saponaro, "Gestures and Object Affordances for Human–Robot Interaction", Ph.D. Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, September, 2019

MSc Theses

[1] Giovanni Saponaro, "Object Manipulation from Simplified Visual Cues", Master Thesis in Computer Engineering (Artificial Intelligence Systems), Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, 2009