Papers
10
Total Citations
203
H-Index
6
About
Riccardo Manzotti is an Italian researcher whose work sits at the provocative intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, with a particular focus on machine consciousness and the theoretical foundations of subjective experience. Over two decades, Manzotti has made sustained contributions to one of the most challenging questions in cognitive science: whether machines can be genuinely conscious, and what that would even mean. His 2009 "Manifesto for Machine Consciousness" (51 citations) established a bold framework for approaching consciousness not merely as an engineering problem but as a profound scientific and philosophical challenge. Complementing this, his work on behavior-based and motivation-based robots explored how emotion and goal-generation might serve as cognitive scaffolding in artificial agents. His 2018 critique of mainstream approaches — targeting frameworks like global workspace theory and information integration — reflects his willingness to challenge orthodoxies in the field. Manzotti has also contributed technically, including early work on log-polar disparity estimation for vergence control in robotic vision. Threading through his career is a consistent skepticism toward internalist assumptions about mind, pushing instead toward process-based and externalist alternatives. His body of work invites students and researchers to reconsider what consciousness fundamentally is before presuming to build it.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS: A MANIFESTO FOR ROBOTICS51 citations · 2009
- 2Disparity Estimation on Log-Polar Images and Vergence Control49 citations · 2001
- 3
- 4From behaviour-based robots to motivation-based robots33 citations · 2004
- 5Cognitive Integration through Goal-Generation in a Robotic Setup14 citations · 2012
- 6A Process-Based Architecture for an Artificial Conscious Being11 citations · 2003
- 7EMOTIONS AND LEARNING IN A DEVELOPING ROBOT5 citations · 2001
- 8
- 9
- 10