Maura Mengoni

Associate Professor of Design tools and methods at the Faculty of Engineering since 2012. Her research covers investigating XR paradigms and applications, affective computing and its role in creating individualized human experiences and finally introducing human factors in every field where people lives and interact. For instance she focused on designing objects enabling a connection with people while interacting with them, sensible spaces reacting to humans for wellbeing and inclusion, systems to capture ergonomics and use indexes to realize a more human-centered factory. She is also experienced in developing user-centered design approaches and supporting tools for participatory design and user-based assessment. She developed applications for MR environments and their benchmark. In 2017 she founded EMOJ, an academic spinoff (www.emojlab.com), today a deep tech company, and is one of the inventors of a set of patented Deep Learning algorithms for face coding to recognize the user identity and emotional status, for gaze detection and body tracking to analyze the user attention, interest and finally behaviors. She is the scientific coordinator for EMOJ of the NEXTPERCETION project (H2020-ECSEL-2019-2-RIA) and KITT4SME Part A, and winner of the Woman Tech call (Horizon EIE-Scaleup-01-03). The technology for the calculation of the Musculoskeletal Disorder risk based on AI ergonomics analysis won the “Best Paper” at the 2020 International ASME conference. Since 2019 she is the coordinator of the XR committee of the National Cluster of Cultural Heritage, where she leads research on future trends in XRT and support in the development of Italian demonstrators.