francesco verdoja

Francesco Verdoja received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Turin, Italy in July 2017. During his PhD studies his research focused on graph-based image processing, with his work on tumor segmentation awarding him the “Best student award” at the International Computer Vision Summer School 2014 (ICVSS14). Since September 2017 he joined the Intelligent Robotics group at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland as postdoctoral researcher. At the same time, he was working part-time as AI scientist for the AI consultancy company SiloAI.

Currently, he works as staff scientist in robotics in Aalto University. He is the coordinator for the Aalto Robot Lab. His research focuses on robotic perception and mapping with particular interest on increasing environment understanding by extracting semantic knowledge from spatial representations. His contributions include for example mapping complete occupancy of objects from partial sensor data and estimating people flow from architecture, as well as the formulation of the idea of hypermaps as next step beyond multi-layer mapping for robotics.

Other achievements include three patents based on his research, the preparation and management of two large scale Finnish national research projects, and the organization of several workshops at top conferences in robotics.