Gianluca Baldassarre in 1998 got a BA and MA in Economics and in 1999 got an MSc in Cognitive Psychology and Neural Networks at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. In 2003 he got a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Essex, UK. Then he did a postdoc at the Italian Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, Rome, working on swarm robotics. From 2006 he is a Researcher at this same Institute and coordinates the Research Group that he founded called “LOCEN Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience”. In 2006-2009 he was Team Leader of the EU project “ICEA - Integrating Cognition Emotion and Autonomy” and in 2009-2013 he was the Coordinator of the European Integrated Project “IMCLeVeR- Intrinsically-Motivated Cumulative-Learning Versatile Robots”. His research interests are on cumulative learning of multiple sensorimotor skills driven by extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. He studies these topics with two interdisciplinary approaches: (a) with computational models constrained by data on brain and behaviour, aiming to understand the latter ones; (b) with machine-learning/robotic approaches, aiming to produce technologically useful robots. He has over 100 international peer-review publications.

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