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About

Giacomo Sommavilla is a leading researcher in child-robot interaction, with a focus on building long-term, adaptive social bonds between robots and young users. His work is central to the ALIZ-E project, which explores how robots can sustain meaningful interactions with children over time. Sommavilla’s most cited paper, “Multimodal Child-Robot Interaction: Building Social Bonds” (2013, 206 citations), demonstrates that robots must exhibit coordinated, context-aware behavior to engage users effectively. He further advanced this field with “Towards Long-Term Social Child-Robot Interaction: Using Multi-Activity Switching to Engage Young Users” (2015, 101 citations), which shows how varying activities can maintain children’s interest and support learning or therapeutic goals. Sommavilla also pioneered the interpretation of emotional body language in humanoid robots, as seen in his 2013 study (75 citations) with children. His technical contributions include developing an event-based conversational system for the Nao robot, integrating speech recognition and generation to enable natural dialogue. With over 430 total citations, Sommavilla’s work has laid critical groundwork for deploying social robots in education and healthcare, making him a key figure in human-robot interaction research.