这项研究提出了新的策略，以研究信任和群体动态在儿童机器人相互作用中的相互影响。我们使用类人机器人ICUB实施了类似游戏的实验活动，并设计了一份问卷来评估孩子如何看待这种相互作用。我们还旨在验证传感器，设置和任务是否适合研究此类方面。问卷的结果表明，年轻人将ICUB视为朋友，通常以积极的方式将ICUB视为朋友。其他初步结果表明，通常，孩子在活动期间信任ICUB，并且在其错误后，他们试图用诸如：“不用担心ICUB，我们原谅您”之类的句子来放心。此外，对机器人在小组认知活动中的信任似乎会根据性别而发生变化：在机器人连续两个错误之后，女孩倾向于比男孩更信任ICUB。最后，跨游戏计算的点和自我报告的量表之间的不同年龄组之间没有明显的差异。我们提出的工具适合研究不同年龄段的人类机器人相互作用（HRI）的信任，并且似乎适合理解小组相互作用的信任机制。

人类具有非凡的能力来传达和阅读对象的属性，只需看到它们被别人带走即可。人类可用的这种沟通技巧和解释水平对于协作机器人可以自然和有效的互动对于协作机器人至关重要。例如，假设机器人正在移交一个脆弱的对象。在这种情况下，应通过直接和隐性的信息，即通过直接调节机器人的行动来告知其脆弱性的人。这项工作调查了两个具有不同实施方案的机器人（一个ICUB类人体机器人和Baxter机器人）进行交流意图执行的对象操作的感知。我们设计了机器人的动作，以传达对象运输过程中的谨慎性。我们发现，人类观察者不仅可以正确地感知此功能，而且可以在随后的人类物体操纵中引起运动适应的一种形式。此外，我们可以深入了解哪些运动功能可能会或多或少地谨慎地操纵物体。

人类的感知基于无意识的推论，其中感觉输入与先前的信息集成在一起。这种现象被称为上下文依赖性，有助于面对外部世界的不确定性，并在先前的经验上构建了预测。另一方面，人类的感知过程固有地是由社会互动塑造的。但是，上下文依赖性的机制如何影响到迄今为止未知。如果使用以前的经验 - 先验 - 在单个环境中是有益的，那么它可能代表了其他代理商可能没有相同先验的社会场景中的问题，从而在共享环境上造成了感知的错误。本研究解决了这个问题。我们研究了与人形机器人ICUB的互动环境中的上下文依赖性，该机器人是刺激示威者。参与者在两个条件下重现了机器人所示的长度：一个具有社交性的ICUB，另一个与ICUB充当机械臂。机器人的不同行为显着影响了感知的先验使用。此外，社会机器人通过提高准确性并减少参与者的总体感知错误，从而对感知性能产生积极影响。最后，观察到的现象是按照贝叶斯的方法加深和探索共同感知的新概念进行了建模的。

最先进的人工智能（AI）技术达到了令人印象深刻的复杂性。因此，研究人员正在发现越来越多的方法来在现实世界中使用它们。然而，这种系统的复杂性需要引入使那些对人类用户透明的方法。 AI社区正试图通过引入可解释的AI（XAI）字段来克服这个问题，这暂时使AI算法不那么不透明。但是，近年来，Xai更清楚地，Xai远远超过计算机科学问题：由于它是关于沟通，Xai也是一种人类代理互动问题。此外，AI从实验室中出来的实验室。这意味着需要对非专家用户量身定制的XAI解决方案。因此，我们向XAI提出了一个用户以用户为中心的框架，专注于其社会互动的方面，从认知和社会科学的理论和调查中获取灵感。该框架旨在为非专家用户提供互动XAI解决方案的结构。

当操纵对象时，人类将它们的动作精细调整到他们正在处理的特征。因此，细心观察者可以预见被操纵物体的隐藏性质，例如其重量，温度，甚至它是否需要特别注意操纵。这项研究是朝着赋予人类机器人的一步，这是一个最后的能力。具体而言，我们研究机器人如何从单独推断出在线推断，无论是人类伴侣在移动物体时都是小心的。我们表明，即使使用低分辨率摄像头，人形机器人也可以高精度地执行此推理（高达81.3％）。只有短暂的运动没有障碍，仔细识别不足。迅速识别出现谨慎观察合作伙伴的行动将使机器人能够适应对象的行为，以显示与人工合作伙伴相同程度的照顾。

Continual Learning (CL) is a field dedicated to devise algorithms able to achieve lifelong learning. Overcoming the knowledge disruption of previously acquired concepts, a drawback affecting deep learning models and that goes by the name of catastrophic forgetting, is a hard challenge. Currently, deep learning methods can attain impressive results when the data modeled does not undergo a considerable distributional shift in subsequent learning sessions, but whenever we expose such systems to this incremental setting, performance drop very quickly. Overcoming this limitation is fundamental as it would allow us to build truly intelligent systems showing stability and plasticity. Secondly, it would allow us to overcome the onerous limitation of retraining these architectures from scratch with the new updated data. In this thesis, we tackle the problem from multiple directions. In a first study, we show that in rehearsal-based techniques (systems that use memory buffer), the quantity of data stored in the rehearsal buffer is a more important factor over the quality of the data. Secondly, we propose one of the early works of incremental learning on ViTs architectures, comparing functional, weight and attention regularization approaches and propose effective novel a novel asymmetric loss. At the end we conclude with a study on pretraining and how it affects the performance in Continual Learning, raising some questions about the effective progression of the field. We then conclude with some future directions and closing remarks.

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.

Detecting anomalous data within time series is a very relevant task in pattern recognition and machine learning, with many possible applications that range from disease prevention in medicine, e.g., detecting early alterations of the health status before it can clearly be defined as "illness" up to monitoring industrial plants. Regarding this latter application, detecting anomalies in an industrial plant's status firstly prevents serious damages that would require a long interruption of the production process. Secondly, it permits optimal scheduling of maintenance interventions by limiting them to urgent situations. At the same time, they typically follow a fixed prudential schedule according to which components are substituted well before the end of their expected lifetime. This paper describes a case study regarding the monitoring of the status of Laser-guided Vehicles (LGVs) batteries, on which we worked as our contribution to project SUPER (Supercomputing Unified Platform, Emilia Romagna) aimed at establishing and demonstrating a regional High-Performance Computing platform that is going to represent the main Italian supercomputing environment for both computing power and data volume.

Recent object detection models for infrared (IR) imagery are based upon deep neural networks (DNNs) and require large amounts of labeled training imagery. However, publicly-available datasets that can be used for such training are limited in their size and diversity. To address this problem, we explore cross-modal style transfer (CMST) to leverage large and diverse color imagery datasets so that they can be used to train DNN-based IR image based object detectors. We evaluate six contemporary stylization methods on four publicly-available IR datasets - the first comparison of its kind - and find that CMST is highly effective for DNN-based detectors. Surprisingly, we find that existing data-driven methods are outperformed by a simple grayscale stylization (an average of the color channels). Our analysis reveals that existing data-driven methods are either too simplistic or introduce significant artifacts into the imagery. To overcome these limitations, we propose meta-learning style transfer (MLST), which learns a stylization by composing and tuning well-behaved analytic functions. We find that MLST leads to more complex stylizations without introducing significant image artifacts and achieves the best overall detector performance on our benchmark datasets.

Objective: Accurate visual classification of bladder tissue during Trans-Urethral Resection of Bladder Tumor (TURBT) procedures is essential to improve early cancer diagnosis and treatment. During TURBT interventions, White Light Imaging (WLI) and Narrow Band Imaging (NBI) techniques are used for lesion detection. Each imaging technique provides diverse visual information that allows clinicians to identify and classify cancerous lesions. Computer vision methods that use both imaging techniques could improve endoscopic diagnosis. We address the challenge of tissue classification when annotations are available only in one domain, in our case WLI, and the endoscopic images correspond to an unpaired dataset, i.e. there is no exact equivalent for every image in both NBI and WLI domains. Method: We propose a semi-surprised Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based method composed of three main components: a teacher network trained on the labeled WLI data; a cycle-consistency GAN to perform unpaired image-to-image translation, and a multi-input student network. To ensure the quality of the synthetic images generated by the proposed GAN we perform a detailed quantitative, and qualitative analysis with the help of specialists. Conclusion: The overall average classification accuracy, precision, and recall obtained with the proposed method for tissue classification are 0.90, 0.88, and 0.89 respectively, while the same metrics obtained in the unlabeled domain (NBI) are 0.92, 0.64, and 0.94 respectively. The quality of the generated images is reliable enough to deceive specialists. Significance: This study shows the potential of using semi-supervised GAN-based classification to improve bladder tissue classification when annotations are limited in multi-domain data.