About Manuel

Born and bred in the Italian countryside, Manuel lived in a tiny village (less than 1500 people) surrounded by vineyards for most of his life. He studied accounting before realising that his place was not at a desk dealing with double entry bookkeeping.

He thus shifted to computer engineering (and business administration), graduating from the University of Trento, Italy, and later studied artificial intelligence and cognitive science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. At Sussex, he also completed a PhD in informatics and artificial intelligence, under the supervision of Chris Buckley, working on ideas of variational free energy minimisation and active inference as models of sensorimotor loops in the context of embodied and enactive cognitive science.

Following his PhD, he worked with Chris, Anil Seth and Warrick Roseboom on some applications of active inference to robotics (Chris) and modelling of responses in psychophysics (Anil and Warrick). In November 2019, Manuel joined RIKEN CBS, Saitama, Japan, as a JSPS/Royal Society Postdoctoral Fellow to work with Taro Toyoizumi on models of uncertainty for human behaviour and perception. In November 2021, he then moved to Araya Inc., Tokyo, Japan, a startup run by Ryota Kanai to become a full time Researcher in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Positions covered

2021 - Researcher at Araya Inc., Tokyo, Japan

2019 - 2021 Postdoctral research fellow at RIKEN CBS, Wako, Saitama, Japan

2019 - 2019 Postdoctral research fellow at Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

2015 - 2019 PhD in Informatics and Artificial Intelligence, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK