Institutes involved
The project is carried out by the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC), which is one of more than 100 institutes belonging to the National Research Council (CNR), the largest public research institution in Italy.
The main field of interest of the ISTC is the Cognitive Science, as the general study of the Intelligent Systems: natural and artificial, human and non-human, individual and collective; the underlying architectures and the involved cognitive processes; the development and the evolution of such processes, including the pathologic ones and the resulting behavioural disorders. The ISTC presents an approach that is inter-disciplinary: the researchers come from different domains such as Psychology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Primatology, Sociology, Robotics, Informatics, Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. The Institute carries out its research mission through the concurrent activities of several laboratories and research groups which collaborate in order to increase the knowledge in the domain of the Cognitive Science.
Although the ISTC-CNR is the sole "official" member of the project, two other institutes contribute to the proposal tasks:
- the experimental phase involving human participants is supported since 2018 by the Department of Human Neuroscience, Section of Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry, University of Rome Sapienza. This department is a reference centre for the research, diagnosis and treatment of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (e.g. Autism Spectrum Disorders, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders, Anxiety Disorders); moreover it conducted several studies on the early diagnosis of ASD.
- the engineering phase - to improve the current prototype - will be supported by the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems -Rome Unit- (IMM), another institute belonging to the CNR. This research lab is at the forefront of micro and nano electronics, and development and fabrication of flexible sensors and actuators.