PhD position on “Augmented sensorimotor interaction”

The project starts from the assumption that human cultural and moral evolution can only be based on the development of efficient cooperation, and coherence among people. In fact, human perception, action and cognition are geared to enable successful coordination with others. The MNIlab devises computational methods to quantify the information flow between human body movements in small group of participants (1). In fact, body movement is the key channel for non-verbal communication (2). The successful candidate will work on the extension and consolidation of this methodology to different scenarios (i.e. small group behavior during meetings or sport activities) and the development of the analytical tools to extract in real-time the quantitative flow of sensorimotor communication (Granger Causality, Transfer Entropy, Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis). The research program will be complemented by basic motor neurophysiological research on behavioral coordination (3). All these aspects will be critical to implement the next generation of biologically inspired automatic sensorimotor communication recognition systems. These automatic systems will be essential to augment natural human-human coordination and promote the future of efficient human-robot interaction.

The successful candidate will have a background in computer science, engineering, computational neuroscience or experimental psychology. Programming skills as well as a strong motivation in bridging the gap between technology and neuroscience are necessary. Kinematic data analyses skills are a plus.