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I am a PostDoc in the PAVIS group at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). The main focus of my research activity is the design of computer vision models that enable robots to explore and interact with objects or people in the environment.

Before joining IIT, I was a PhD student in Interactive and Cognitive Environments, a joint Doctorate between University of Genoa and Queen Mary University of London. The main topic of my PhD research was Affordance Segmentation that identifies the surfaces of potential interaction between an agent (e.g. a robotic hand) and an object relying only on visual information. The exciting and fascinating aspect of Affordance Segmentation is the connection to robotic and prosthetic applications, enabling assistive technologies (e.g., grasping, object manipulation) or collaborative human-robot scenarios.


Education

Title: PhD in Interactive and Cognitive Environments
Institute: University of Genoa | Queen Mary University of London
Location: Genoa | London
Country: Italy | UK
From: 2020 To: 2023

Title: MSc in Electronics Engineering
Institute: University of Genoa
Location: Genoa
Country: Italy
From: 2017 To: 2019

Title: BSc in Electronics Engineering and Information Technologies
Institute: University of Genoa
Location: Genoa
Country: Italy
From: 2014 To: 2017

All Publications
2025
Galliena T., Apicella T., Rosa S., Morerio P., Del Bue A., Natale L.
Embodied Image Captioning: Self-supervised Learning Agents for Spatially Coherent Image Descriptions
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
Article in Press Conference
2025
Apicella T., Xompero A., Gastaldo P., Cavallaro A.
Segmenting Object Affordances: Reproducibility and Sensitivity to Scale
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 15634 LNCS, pp. 286-304
Conference Paper Book Series
2023
Apicella T., Xompero A., Ragusa E., Berta R., Cavallaro A., Gastaldo P.
Affordance segmentation of hand-occluded containers from exocentric images
Proceedings - 2023 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops, ICCVW 2023, pp. 1890-1899
2023
Albanese A., Taccioli T., Apicella T., Brunelli D., Ragusa E.
Design and Deployment of an Efficient Landing Pad Detector
Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol. 546 LNNS, pp. 137-147
2022
Apicella T., Slavic G., Ragusa E., Gastaldo P., Marcenaro L.
CONTAINER LOCALISATION AND MASS ESTIMATION WITH AN RGB-D CAMERA
ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings, vol. 2022-May, pp. 9152-9155