Alessandro Bruno, researcher at Humanitas University, was awarded the prize for best original work within the international workshop HBAxSCES
Alessandro Bruno‘s journey is a common story among those young researchers who, due to personal aptitudes and a desire to experience new research and work opportunities, decide to move, change city and country. Often several times.
It all started in 2008 when Bruno graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Palermo, with a thesis on biomedical image processing. And it was while writing his thesis that his passion for research led him to apply for a three-year PhD scholarship at the same university. During this period, he specialised in image analysis and artificial intelligence, in particular the identification of counterfeit images, biomedical image analysis and image analysis from the perspective of visual attention processes, i.e. trying to identify where humans look during the first three seconds of observation. After a few years in various institutes in Palermo, including the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), the time came to look further afield. ‘The first experience was in Great Britain in 2019, at the prestigious University College London (UCL), as a Research Visitor in the imaging group of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory,’ explains Alessandro Bruno. Subsequently, in 2020, I won a position as Research Associate, also in Great Britain, at the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA), a centre of excellence on topics such as Computer Animation, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence.
In 2021, after undergoing a selection process, he joined Bournemouth University‘s Department of Computing and Informatics as a Lecturer in Computing. During this period, he taught two courses in the Faculty of Science and Technology and was Co-Investigator of a European research project, S4AllCities. He was also invited by the CRUK (Cancer Research United Kingdom) foundation to serve as an ad-hoc member of the expert panel review to assess the scientific validity of research project proposals in the field of early cancer detection using Artificial Intelligence methods. Overall, the experience in the UK lasted almost three years.
The opportunity to return to Italy to Humanitas University came from a Grant from AIRC – Fondazione AIRC per la Ricerca sul Cancro, for a project dedicated to the identification of prognostic factors in lung cancer patients, using medical images and tumor DNA. ‘This AIRC project represents the continuation of what I was doing in the UK with the CRUK foundation,’ explains Bruno, `studying hand image processing and the aspect of genomics, as well as the realization of artificial intelligence methods for early identification and precision medicine through biomarkers’.
Recently, an important work coordinated by Alessandro Bruno1 as part of the HBAxSCES (Human Behaviour Analysis for Smart City Safety Environment) International Workshop was evaluated as ‘Best Original Work’ for content, research and presentation. The study uses deep learning model tools to identify the abnormal behaviour of crowds in the event of alarm or dangerous situations.
- High-level Feature Extraction for Crowd Behaviour Analysis: a Computer Vision approach – Department of Computing and Informatics at Bournemouth University, Poole, UK