Giovanni Saponaro

Contact Information

gsaponaro@isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt
tel. +351 21 8418050
room 7.26, Torre Norte (ext. 2050)

Address

VisLab - Torre Norte, 7th floor
Institute for Systems and Robotics - Instituto Superior Técnico
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1
1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal

Since 2023, I work as Director of Engineering for AlgoFace. Previously, I was with Eyeware.

In 2019, I obtained a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at VisLab - Computer Vision Laboratory (ISR/IST, U Lisboa) under the supervision of Prof. Alexandre Bernardino. I was co-supervised by Prof. Giampiero Salvi and Prof. Lorenzo Jamone. My research focused on visual perception and reasoning algorithms for letting robots operate in human environments. You can find my thesis in the bottom of this page.

Together with linguists, computer vision experts, neuroscientists and roboticists, I participated in the POETICON++ – Robots Need Language project, developing mechanisms to make a robot execute a human verbal instruction in the presence of environment uncertainty.

I spent part of my PhD in the Speech, Music and Hearing department of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, designing an automatic gesture recognition system based on the principles of automatic speech recognition.

I am a founding board member of Hipácia, the association of Italian researchers in Portugal.

Publications (see also my Google Scholar profile)

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, vol. 12, issue 2, pp. 209–221, June 2020. [PDF, mirror, IEEE Xplore] [code]
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. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob 2017). Lisbon, Portugal, 18-21 September 2017. [PDF, mirror, IEEE Xplore] [poster]
Alexandre Antunes, Giovanni Saponaro, Anthony Morse, Lorenzo Jamone, José Santos-Victor, Angelo Cangelosi. Learn, Plan, Remember: A Developmental Robot Architecture for Task Solving. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob 2017). Lisbon, Portugal, 18-21 September 2017. [PDF, mirror, IEEE Xplore]
Giovanni Saponaro, Lorenzo Jamone, Alexandre Bernardino and Giampiero Salvi. Interactive Robot Learning of Gestures, Language and Affordances. International Workshop on Grounding Language Understanding (GLU), Satellite of Interspeech 2017. Stockholm, Sweden, 25 August 2017. [PDF, mirror, ISCA Archive]
Alexandre Antunes, Lorenzo Jamone, Giovanni Saponaro, Alexandre Bernardino, Rodrigo Ventura. From Human Instructions to Robot Actions: Formulation of Goals, Affordances and Probabilistic Planning. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2016). Stockholm, Sweden, 16-21 May 2016. [PDF, mirror, IEEE Xplore]
Alexandre Antunes, Giovanni Saponaro, Atabak Dehban, Lorenzo Jamone, Rodrigo Ventura, Alexandre Bernardino, José Santos-Victor. Robotic tool use and problem solving based on probabilistic planning and learned affordances. Workshop on Learning Object Affordances, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2015). Hamburg, Germany, 28 September 2015. [PDF]
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. Italian Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (AIRO), International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2015). Ferrara, Italy, 22 September 2015. [PDF]
Afonso Gonçalves, João Abrantes, Giovanni Saponaro, Lorenzo Jamone, Alexandre Bernardino. Learning Intermediate Object Affordances: Towards the Development of a Tool Concept. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob 2014). Genoa, Italy, 13-16 October 2014. [PDF, mirror, IEEE Xplore]
Afonso Gonçalves, Giovanni Saponaro, Lorenzo Jamone, Alexandre Bernardino. Learning Visual Affordances of Objects and Tools through Autonomous Robot Exploration. IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC 2014). Espinho, Portugal, 14-15 May 2014. [PDF, mirror, IEEE Xplore]
Afonso Gonçalves, Lorenzo Jamone, Giovanni Saponaro, Alexandre Bernardino. Autonomous Learning of Tool Affordances. Portuguese Conference on Pattern Recognition (RecPad 2013). Lisbon, Portugal, 1 November 2013. [PDF, mirror] [poster]
Giovanni Saponaro, Giampiero Salvi, Alexandre Bernardino. Robot Anticipation of Human Intentions through Continuous Gesture Recognition. International Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Human Robot Interaction (CR-HRI 2013), International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2013). San Diego, USA, 20-24 May 2013. [PDF, mirror, IEEE Xplore] [slides]
Giovanni Saponaro, Alexandre Bernardino. Generation of Meaningful Robot Expressions with Active Learning. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2011), Late Breaking Report. Lausanne, Switzerland, 6-9 March 2011. [PDF, mirror, ACM Digital Library] [poster]
Giovanni Saponaro, Alexandre Bernardino. Bootstrapping Visual Memories for a Humanoid Robot. Portuguese Conference on Pattern Recognition (RecPad 2009). Aveiro, Portugal, 23 October 2009. [PDF, mirror] [poster]
Giovanni Saponaro, Alexandre Bernardino. Pose Estimation for Grasping Preparation from Stereo Ellipses. Workshop on Humanoid Robotics, 11th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines (CLAWAR 2008). Coimbra, Portugal, 8-10 September 2008. [PDF, mirror]

Conferences and Events Attended ("Where Have We Met Before?")

CLAIRE Symposium (Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe). Brussels, Belgium, 7 September 2018.
7th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob). Lisbon, Portugal, 18-21 September 2017.
International Workshop on Grounding Language Understanding (GLU), INTERSPEECH 2017. Stockholm, Sweden, 25 August 2017.
Smart Environments and Multi-modal Interaction Hackathon. Barcelona, Spain, 21 February 2016.
Sixth EUCogIII Members Conference. Genoa, Italy, 17-18 October 2014.
4th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob). Genoa, Italy, 13-16 October 2014.
BMVA Meeting on Vision, Language and Manipulation. London, UK, 11 July 2014. [video]
IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC 2014). Espinho, Portugal, 14-15 May 2014.
Fifth EUCogIII Members Conference. Bochum, Germany, 19-20 March 2014.
Fourth EUCogIII Members Conference. Brighton, UK, 23-24 October 2013.
Veni Vidi Vici RobotCub Summer School 2013 (VVV13). Sestri Levante, Italy, 15-24 July 2013.
4th International Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Human Robot Interaction (CR-HRI 2013), part of the International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2013). San Diego, USA, 20-24 May 2013.
Veni Vidi Vici RobotCub Summer School 2012 (VVV12). Sestri Levante, Italy, 18-27 July 2012.
Fourth EUCogII Members Conference. Thessaloniki, Greece, 11-12 April 2011.
6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2011). Lausanne, Switzerland, 6-9 March 2011.
15th Portuguese Conference on Pattern Recognition (RecPad 2009). Aveiro, Portugal, 23 October 2009.
Veni Vidi Vici RobotCub Summer School 2009 (VVV09). Sestri Levante, Italy, 20-29 July 2009.
Madeira Usability and Software Encounters (MUSE III). Funchal, Portugal, 6-14 July 2009.
11th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines (CLAWAR 2008). Coimbra, Portugal, 8-10 September 2008.

Education

PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019. Thesis: Gestures and Object Affordances for Human–Robot Interaction [PDF, mirror] [slides]. Supervisor: Prof. Alexandre Bernardino. Co-supervisors: Prof. Giampiero Salvi, Prof. Lorenzo Jamone. Grade: Pass with Distinction.
MSc in Computer Engineering (Artificial Intelligence Systems), Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, 2009. Thesis: Object Manipulation from Simplified Visual Cues [PDF, mirror]. Advisors: Prof. Daniele Nardi and Prof. Alexandre Bernardino. Grade: summa cum laude (110 e lode).
BSc in Computer Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, 2005. Thesis: DTD Similarity Analyzer (Analizzatore di similarità tra DTD, [Italian PDF]). Grade: 99/110.