Carmelo Calafiore

Carmelo has a PhD from the University of Essex in the UK with a wide technical background that includes computer vision, machine learning, statistics, psychology, computational neuroscience, and cognitive robotics.

He started his academic studies with a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in psychological sciences at the Università degli studi G. D’Annunzio Chieti-Pescara in Italy, where he learned major disciplines like advanced statistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. He was delighted to receive a scholarship for his BSc studies.

Subsequently, he got interested in the computational approaches that model the brain’s cognitive processes, and thus, did a Master of Science (MSc) in computational neuroscience and cognitive robotics at the University of Birmingham in the UK. In this MSc course, he learned machine learning, with a major focus on deep learning, Bayesian estimations and data modelling. His first deep learning project was about decoding the location of visual stimuli from the electroencephalogram (EEG) responses of some human participants.

Afterwards, Carmelo received a PhD scholarship from the University of Essex in the UK. His PhD was in vision, where he investigated and compared the active action recognition of robots and humans. The robots were recurrent convolutional neural networks optimised with supervisory learning to recognise the actions in dynamic videos and reinforcement learning to select the next-optimal viewpoints for action recognition.

Lastly, he joined the Research Software Engineering (RSE) team at the Newcastle University, where he supports academic research with his expertise in machine learning, statistics, and data analysis.