Dr Daniela Conti PhD, MPsy, BSc
Casual Senior Researcher
Summary
Daniela is a casual Senior Researcher in Faculty of College of Business, Technology and Engineering, Sheffield Hallam University. She is a graduate (BSc and MSc) in Psychology (2008, 2010) and BSc in Psychiatric Rehabilitation and Social Education (2002), all awarded with the highest distinction (110/110 cum laude), and received the PhD in Neuroscience at University of Catania, Italy (2016). Before joining Sheffield Hallam University in January 2017, she spent one year as a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at the University of Plymouth, UK. She is a licensed clinical psychologist certified by National Board of Psychologists (Italy), since September 2011. Daniela was a Visiting Professor at the Humanities Department of the University of Catania in the second semester of 2020.
Her work mainly focuses on the applicability of robotics to autism spectrum disorder with intellectual disability, and the acceptability of robotics in clinical and educational settings.
About
Daniela is author of numerous scientific publications. Her work has been supported by the H2020 research and innovation program of the European Union with a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship: CARER-AID project "Controlled Autonomous Robot for Early Detection and Rehabilitation of Autism and Intellectual Disability". Grant Agreement n.703489.
Research
2019- present: "Robot Enhanced Therapy for Children with Special Needs", which is in collaboration with the Outpatient Team of the Sheffield Children’s Hospital and the University of Sheffield.
2019- present: "Cognitive Assessment through Human-robot Interaction", which is in collaboration with the Hursley Labs of the International Business Machines (IBM).
Publications
Journal articles
Commodari, E., La Rosa, V.L., Coniglio, M.A., & Conti, D. (2021). Editorial: Closure and Reopening of Schools and Universities During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prevention and Control Measures, Support Strategies for Vulnerable Students and Psychosocial Needs. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.769622
De Pasquale, C., Sciacca, F., Conti, D., Pistorio, M.L., Hichy, Z., Cardullo, R.L., & Di Nuovo, S. (2021). Relations Between Mood States and Eating Behavior During COVID-19 Pandemic in a Sample of Italian College Students. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 684195. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.684195
Conti, D., Trubia, G., Buono, S., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2020). Social robots to support practitioners in the education and clinical care of children: The CARER-AID project. Life Span and Disability, 23 (1), 17-30. http://www.lifespanjournal.it/client/abstract/ENG361_2.%20Conti.pdf
Rossi, S., Conti, D., Garramone, F., Santangelo, G., Staffa, M., Varrasi, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2020). The Role of Personality Factors and Empathy in the Acceptance and Performance of a Social Robot for Psychometric Evaluations. Robotics, 9 (39). http://doi.org/10.3390/robotics9020039
Han, J., & Conti, D. (2020). The use of UTAUT and Post Acceptance models to investigate the attitude towards a telepresence robot in an educational setting. Robotics, 9 (2), 34. http://doi.org/10.3390/robotics9020034
Conti, D., Trubia, G., Buono, S., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2020). Affect Recognition in Autism: a single case study on integrating a humanoid robot in a standard therapy. Qwerty - Open and Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology, Culture and Education, 14 (2), 66-87. http://doi.org/10.30557/QW000018
Conti, D., Cattani, A., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2019). Are Future Psychologists Willing to Accept and Use a Humanoid Robot in Their Practice? Italian and English Students' Perspective. FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY, 10. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02138
De Pasquale, C., Sciacca, F., Conti, D., Dinaro, C., & Di Nuovo, S. (2019). Personality and dissociative experiences in smartphone users. Life Span and Disability.
Di Nuovo, A., Varrasi, S., Lucas, A., Conti, D., Mcnamara, J., & Soranzo, A. (2019). Assessment of Cognitive skills via Human-robot Interaction and Cloud Computing. Journal of Bionic Engineering, 16 (3), 526-539. http://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-019-0043-2
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., & Cangelosi, A. (2018). Il contributo metodologico della Developmental Robotics alla psicologia. How developmental robotics can give a methodological contribute to the psychology. Ricerche di Psicologia, 41 (2), 221-239. http://doi.org/10.3280/RIP2018-002002
Di Nuovo, A., Conti, D., Trubia, G., Buono, S., & Di Nuovo, S. (2018). Deep learning systems for estimating visual attention in robot-assisted therapy of children with autism and intellectual disability. Robotics, 7 (2), 25. http://doi.org/10.3390/robotics7020025
Conti, D., Commodari, E., & Buono, S. (2017). Personality factors and acceptability of socially assistive robotics in teachers with and without specialized training for children with disability. Life Span and Disability, 20 (2), 251-272. http://www.lifespan.it/sommario.asp?id=94&ordine=0&anno=2017
De Pasquale, C., Conti, D., Pistorio, M.L., Fatuzzo, P., Veroux, M., & Di Nuovo, S. (2017). Comparison of the CBA-H and SF-36 for the screening of the psychological and behavioural variables in chronic dialysis patients. PLOS ONE, 12 (6), e0180077. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180077
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., Cangelosi, A., & Di Nuovo, A. (2016). Lateral specialization in unilateral spatial neglect : a cognitive robotics model. Cognitive Processing, 17 (3), 321-328. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-016-0761-x
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., Buono, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2016). Robots in education and care of children with developmental disabilities : a study on acceptance by experienced and future professionals. International Journal of Social Robotics, 9 (1), 51-62. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0359-6
Cannavò, R., Conti, D., & Di Nuovo, A. (2015). Computer-aided assessment of aviation pilots attention: Design of an integrated test and its empirical validation. Applied Computing and Informatics, 12 (1), 16-26. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aci.2015.05.002
De Pasquale, C., Pistorio, M.L., Lauretta, I., Fatuzzo, P., Fornaro, M., Conti, D., ... Veroux, M. (2014). Somatopsychic correlates and quality of life of the dialyzed patient: a cross-sectional study. Transplantation proceedings, 46 (7), 2199-2202. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.transproceed.2014.07.026
di Nuovo, S., de la Cruz, V., Conti, D., Buono, S., & di Nuovo, A. (2014). Mental imagery: Rehabilitation through simulation. Life Span and Disability, 17 (1), 89-118.
Conti, D., Cirasa, C., Di Nuovo, S., & Di nuovo, A. (n.d.). “Robot, tell me a tale!”: A Social Robot as tool for Teachers in Kindergarten. Interaction Studies.
Conference papers
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2021). A brief review of robotics technologies to support social interventions for older users. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, 189, 221-232. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5784-2_18
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2020). A brief review of robotics technologies to support social interventions for older users. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, 189 (189), 221-232. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5784-2_18
Di Nuovo, A., Bamforth, J., Conti, D., Sage, K., Ibbotson, R., Clegg, J., ... Arnold, K. (2020). An explorative study on robotics for supporting children with Autism Spectrum Disorder during clinical procedures. In 15th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI, (pp. 189-191). Piscataway, NJ, USA: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc: http://doi.org/10.1145/3371382.3378277
Dell'Aquila, E., Maggi, G., Conti, D., & Rossi, S. (2020). A Preparatory Study for Measuring Engagement in Pediatric Virtual and Robotics Rehabilitation Settings. In International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2020, Cambridge (UK), 23 March 2020 - 26 March 2020. ACM: http://doi.org/10.1145/3371382.3378352
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, A., & Di Nuovo, S. (2019). Social robots for older users: a possibility to support assessment and social interventions. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2524. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2524/paper11.pdf
Pollicino, C., Gao, J., Conti, D., Commodari, E., & Soranzo, A. (2019). Q-Methodology and Aesthetic Preferences for IOs: The Role of Alexithymia. PERCEPTION, 48 (2 Supp), 145. https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/peca/48/2_suppl
Di nuovo, A., Varrasi, S., Alexandr, L., Conti, D., Soranzo, A., Bamforth, J., & Mcnamara, J. (2019). Usability Evaluation of a Robotic System for Cognitive Testing. In ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Daegu (Korea), 11 March 2019 - 14 March 2019. IEEE: http://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2019.8673187
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., & Di nuovo, A. (2019). Kindergarten Children Attitude Towards Humanoid Robots: what is the Effect of the First Experience? In ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Daegu (Korea), 11 March 2019 - 14 March 2019. IEEE: http://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2019.8673204
Varrasi, S., Di Nuovo, S., Conti, D., & Di Nuovo, A. (2018). Social robots as psychometric tools for cognitive assessment: a pilot test. In Ficuciello, F., Ruggiero, F., & Finzi, A. (Eds.) Human friendly robotics : 2017 international workshop. Cham: Springer: http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89327-3_8
Rossi, S., Santangelo, G., Staffa, M., Varrasi, S., Conti, D., & Di Nuovo, A. (2018). Psychometric evaluation supported by a social robot: personality factors and technology acceptance. 2018 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 6 (6). http://doi.org/10.1109/roman.2018.8525838
Penders, J., Wang, J., Bhowmik, D., Di Nuovo, A., Soranzo, A., Rolph, J., ... Cameron, D. (2018). Robots claiming space: gauging public reaction usingcomputer vision techniques. In Giuliani, M., Assaf, T., & Giannaccini, M.E. (Eds.) Towards autonomous robotic systems: 19th annual conference, TAROS 2018 proceedings, (pp. 468-470). Springer: http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96728-8
Conti, D., Trubia, G., Buono, S., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2018). Evaluation of a robot-assisted therapy for children with autism and intellectual disability. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 405-415. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96728-8_34
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, A., Trubia, G., Buono, S., & Di Nuovo, S. (2018). Adapting robot-assisted therapy of children with autism and different levels of intellectual disability. In Proceeding HRI '18 Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction :Chicago, IL, USA — March 05 - 08, 2018, (pp. 91-92). New York: ACM Press: http://doi.org/10.1145/3173386.3176962
Varrasi, S., Di Nuovo, S., Conti, D., & Di Nuovo, A. (2018). A social robot for cognitive assessment. In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction : Chicago, IL, USA — March 05 - 08, 2018, (pp. 269-270). New York: ACM Press: http://doi.org/10.1145/3173386.3176995
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, A., Cirasa, C., & Di Nuovo, S. (2017). A comparison of kindergarten storytelling by human and humanoid robot with different social behavior. In HRI '17. Proceedings of the Companion of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI '17, (pp. 97-98). New York: ACM: http://doi.org/10.1145/3029798.3038359
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2015). A cognitive robotics approach for the study of unilateral spatial neglect. COGNITIVE PROCESSING, 16, S86.
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2015). Cognitive robotics for the modelling of cognitive dysfunctions: A study on unilateral spatial neglect. 5th Joint International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics, ICDL-EpiRob 2015, 300-301. http://doi.org/10.1109/DEVLRN.2015.7346161
Conti, D., Cattani, A., Di Nuovo, S., & Di Nuovo, A. (2015). A cross-cultural study of acceptance and use of robotics by future psychology practitioners. 2015 24th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). http://doi.org/10.1109/roman.2015.7333601
Conti, D., Di Nuovo, S., Buono, S., Trubia, G., & Di Nuovo, A. (2015). Use of robotics to stimulate imitation in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A pilot study in a clinical setting. 2015 24th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). http://doi.org/10.1109/roman.2015.7333589