francesco verdoja

Francesco Verdoja received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Turin, Italy in July 2017. After graduation, he joined the Intelligent Robotics group at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, and worked part-time as AI scientist for the AI consultancy company Silo AI, now part of AMD.

After receiving a personal Research Fellowship grant from the Research Council of Finland for the Hypermaps project in 2023, he now works as academy research fellow in robotics at Aalto University. He also serves as 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 graph-based approaches to image segmentation and compression, estimation of complete occupancy of objects from partial sensor data, mapping the relationship between people flow and architecture, as well as the formulation 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.