Sony CSL (Rome)

Thank you to Piero Savastano for his 2 hours seminar on the Cheshire Cat AI! Looking forward to meeting him and the #CheshireCat again. "Meeeoow"! 😺

Our seminar series continues tomorrow with Piero Savastano! Looking forward to knowing more about the #CheshireCat. DM to attend online!

Young researchers inspire young students! Thanks to our Denise Lanzieri for having met the students from the Liceo Statale Pitagora-Croce in Torre Annunziata, and for letting them know about our lab, the activities we are developing with AI, the explorations of the relationship between arts and science and, last but not least, about her personal achievements as a researcher!

Thanks to our colleagues from Sony Europe for sharing this video and for telling the story about our lab! Thanks to Carlotta Desideri for the amazing work she has done with us, to Elisabetta Falivene for editing this video and to all #SonyCSLRome researchers and staff people for their endless enthusiasm!

Congrats to our Emanuele Brugnoli for having published, together with Marco Delmastro, this interesting article on "Dynamics and Triggers of Misinformation on Vaccines". Based on the Covid-19 pandemic, which has sparkled renewed focus on the impact of online misinformation, particularly around critical health issues like vaccines, the research analyzes 6 years (2016–2021) of Italian vaccine debates across major platforms and unveils the distinct dynamics of news production and consumption between questionable and reliable sources. Key findings: - Proactive misinformation. Questionable sources don't just react, they often dominate vaccine discussions, driving agendas and engagement. - Content from questionable sources vastly outpaces reliable news, exposing a striking imbalance. - Insufficient pro-vax communication on vaccine safety created space for anti-vax narratives to thrive, while strong messaging on vaccine efficacy effectively mitigated anti-vax influence. Read the full story below! https://lnkd.in/dXJUK654

We would like to start this new year sharing a nice moment from the past months! We asked the photographer Carlotta Desideri to help us describe ourselves through a simple shoot! The result is simply amazing! Even though it was not that easy to stare at the camera, at the end, we found that the pictures caught several aspects of our way of being researchers, colleagues, and simply Sony CSL people. Vittorio Loreto Alessandro Londei Matteo Bruno Emanuele Brugnoli Hygor Piaget Melo D. Ruggiero Lo Sardo Elisabetta Falivene Cinzia Di Salvio Denise Lanzieri Milena Di Canio Matteo Benati

We asked Luc Steels more about the seminar he will give tomorrow for the researchers at #SonyCSLRome and CREF - Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi and we found his reply already very much interesting! Enjoy the reading below and don’t loose the seminar tomorrow! “One of the important concepts being explored at Sony CSL - Rome for understanding creativity and innovation is that of the adjacent possible, a model originally introduced by Stuart Kauffman within the context of evolutionary biology. This approach introduces a network point of view on innovation, opening our eyes to the idea that inventions extend the space of possibilities, after which new insights and mechanisms come into view. The question remains however how exactly these extensions, these creative leaps, happen. What mental processes are involved? In this talk, I will introduce the notion of a meaning shift as a way to explain creative leaps. A meaning shift happens when the semiotic relations between signs and signifiers changes. We become aware of other features of the problem situation and develop other categorizations of reality. We discover new affordances and new roles for entities in tasks. Sometimes we reframe the way to handle a task entirely. I will give examples of meaning shifts and make suggestions how they can be modeled computationally using AI techniques.”

It’s all about researching… and finding the perfect people to work with! Happy everything you believe in, from all of us at #SonyCSLRome!

Congrats to our Augmented Creativity team, whose poster on #DreamingLearning has been accepted at NeurIPS, the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, that took place some days ago in Vancouver. The study by Alessandro Londei, Matteo Benati, Denise Lanzieri and Vittorio Loreto incorporated the concept of dreaming into Artificial Intelligence, during its learning phase. This approach has led to remarkable advancements in artificial minds, aligning with neuro scientific hypotheses. Specifically, when the data used to train an #AI changes over time, "dreaming AIs" adapt significantly faster to new paradigms. Even more impressively, their overall creativity improves, resulting in intelligent systems that are potentially far more valuable in supporting human creativity. To know more on this topic, have a look at the link below. https://lnkd.in/dy2Xxch9 (In the picture Matteo's struggle to make a shot of himself and the poster behind, to avoid the communications manager's complaints about not having pics of the event... 😜 )

We would like to congratulate our director Vittorio Loreto for this prestigious achievement, since he has been recently appointed foreign member into the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.