Bio
Massimiliano Di Luca received the Laurea in Psychology from the Università di Trieste in 2000 and PhD Degree in Cognitive Science from Brown University in 2006. He has been scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, visiting scientist at Oculus, and research scientist at Facebook Reality Labs. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham where he performs fundamental research in academia and applied research in industry. He has published over 100 between papers, chapters and patents in the areas of perception, computational modelling, haptics, and virtual reality. He has received funding from the European Commission, the Royal Society, the BBSRC, the EPSRC, as well as from several industrial partners. He is Fellow of the InterContinental Academia for Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence.
Research interests
Massimiliano uses psychophysical experiments, movement capture, and neuroimaging methods to understand how the brain employs multiple sources of sensory information and combines them with assumptions about the environment, predictions about future states of the world, and information obtained through active exploration and manipulation. He employs signal processing and machine learning to discover patterns in the interaction and user's movements that relate to perception. The leitmotif of his research is to create computational models that constitute quantitative and testable theories about the underlying cognitive and neural processes. Such models can be used for simulations (e.g., to be implemented in robots), rendering (e.g., in haptic devices), and prediction about the user movement, responses, states (e.g., to optimise VR and AR systems by using perception-based metrics).