Primary tabs
Alberto Greco
Developing adaptive systems to foster human well-being and strengthen social bonds
Alberto Greco, PhD
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Department of Information Engineering – University of Pisa
Centro di Ricerca “E. Piaggio”
“My goal is to develop computational models of the psychophysiological processes underlying emotions and social interaction, and to translate them into adaptive technologies for enhancing well-being and human connection.”
Alberto Greco is Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Pisa. He received his MSc in Biomedical Engineering (2010) and his PhD in Automation, Robotics and Bioengineering (2016) from the University of Pisa. After some years as a post-doctoral researcher and tenure-track faculty (RTDA, RTDB), he was appointed Associate Professor in 2024.
He coordinates the national PRIN 2022 project BRAVE – Biofeedback-based personalised Virtual-reality exposure therapies for anxiety disorders, and previously acted as technical co-coordinator of the H2020 FET-Proactive project POTION – Promoting social interaction through emotional body odours, a large European initiative exploring the role of human chemosignals in emotional contagion and social behaviour.
His research focuses on the analysis and computational modelling of physiological signals and their interactions, the development of wearable and immersive biofeedback systems, and statistical and machine-learning models for affective and social computing. Application domains include emotion regulation, mental health, human–machine interaction, and the quantitative study of social bonding and interpersonal synchrony.
He is the author or co-author of more than 160 scientific publications in biomedical engineering, psychophysiology, and artificial intelligence. Among his methodological contributions, he co-developed cvxEDA (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7229284), one of the most widely used frameworks for the analysis of electrodermal activity, now a reference tool in affective computing and psychophysiological research.
In parallel to his academic activity, he co-founded and managed two spin-offs of the University of Pisa: Feel-ING srl, dedicated to the development of technologies for physiological sensing and emotion-aware human–machine interaction; and CARTESIA srl, dedicated to empathic conversational AI and social robotics, aimed at advancing human–AI interaction through emotionally adaptive dialogue and neuro-inspired models of empathy.
BRAVE Project and Lab
Within the BRAVE project, Alberto Greco established and coordinates the BRAVE Lab (Bioengineering Research on Affective computing, Virtual reality and Empathetic Systems), a research laboratory dedicated to computational models of emotion and social interaction, biofeedback systems, and adaptive virtual environments.
The BRAVE Lab integrates physiological signal processing, machine and deep learning, virtual reality and social robotics to build systems that continuously estimate the user’s internal state and adapt to it in real time, enabling new forms of personalized therapy, social functioning support, and emotionally-aware human–AI interaction.
BRAVE Research Lab, Team and Project:
https://braveproject.unipi.it/ResearchLab