Hi, I'm Federico. I'm a humanist, turned economist, turned data scientist, turned published researcher in AI. I am a postdoctoral scholar in Michael Levin's lab at Tufts University, USA.

My interests span:

• Embodied cognition
• Artificial life
• Computational biology

In particular, I am keen to learn more about basal intelligence.

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at the Evolutionary Robotics and Artificial Life Lab at the University of Trieste and have been a visiting research fellow of prof. Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont.

Selected Publications

• F. Pigozzi, S. Woodman, E. Medvet, R. K. Bottiglio, and J. Bongard. 2023. "Morphology Choice Affects the Evolution of Affordance Detection in Robots." Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
• F. Pigozzi, E. Medvet, A. Bartoli, M. Rochelli. 2023. "Factors Impacting Diversity and Effectiveness of Evolved Modular Soft Robots." ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization
• F. Pigozzi, Y. Tang, E. Medvet, and D. Ha. 2022. "Evolving Modular Soft Robots Without Explicit Inter-Module Communication Using Local Self-Attention." Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (best paper nomination at complex systems track)

2023. Google Cloud Research Credits
2023. Best Student Essay @ALife'23
2022. Best Paper Award Nomination, Complex Systems Track @GECCO'22
2022. Best Student Essay @ALife'22
2022. Virtual Creatures Competition, runner-up
2021. Best Paper Award, Complex Systems Track @GECCO'21
2021. Best Student Essay By a PhD Student @ALife'21, runner-up
2021. Virtual Creatures Competition, finalist
2018. MSc. scholarship "training the specialists of the future"
2016. College Federal Reserve Challenge, 3rd place (national)

Student Organizations

• Emerging Researchers in ALife (ERA), general chair, 2023-

• Emerging Researchers in ALife (ERA), conference chair, 2021-2022 2022-2023

Reviewer

• The Artificial Life Conference, 2023

• Soft Robotics, 2022

• Artificial Life, 2021

• Embodied Intelligence Conference, e-Cambridge (UK), 22/03/2023 - 24/03/2023

• Embodied Intelligence Conference, e-Cambridge (UK), 23/03/2022 - 25/03/2022

• SIGEVO Summer School, e-Lille, 05/07/2021 - 09/07/2021

• Workshop on Embodied Intelligence, e-Cambridge (UK), 24/03/2021 - 26/03/2021

• When Deep Learning Meets Logic, e-Cambridge, 15/02/2021 - 17/02/2021

• Canberra Artificial Intelligence Summer School, e-Canberra, 04/12/2020 - 07/12/2020

• Workshop on Science of Data Science, Trieste, 30/09/2019 - 04/10/2019

• Programming Lab, Fall 2021

• Machine Learning and Evolutionary Robotics, Fall 2022

• "Of Typewriters and PCs", ALife'23, 28/07/2023

• "Morphology Choice Affects the Evolution of Affordance Detection in Robots", GECCO, 10/07/2023

• "How the Morphology Encoding Influences the Learning Ability in Body-Brain Co-optimization", GECCO, 10/07/2023

• "Morphology Choice Affects the Evolution of Affordance Detection in Robots", Embodied Intelligence Conference, 22/03/2023

• "Shape change and control of pressure-based soft agents", ALife'22, 20/07/2022

• "Evolving Modular Soft Robots without Explicit Inter-Module Communication using Local Self-Attention", GECCO, 11/07/2022

• "Evolving Modular Soft Robots without Explicit Inter-Module Communication using Local Self-Attention", Embodied Intelligence Conference, 23/03/2022

• "Biodiversity in Evolved Voxel-based Soft Robots", the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), 12/07/2021

2024. Ph.D. Computer Engineering
2020. MSc. Data Science and Scientific Computing, summa cum laude
2017. BSc. Economics, summa cum laude