Sara Falcone

Profile

I was born and raised in Napoli. I followed the bachelor in Language and Linguistics at the University of Napoli Federico II. During my bachelor, I had an Erasmus+ experience in Paris, at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle. After my graduation in October 2016, I did an internship of one year in a laboratory of NLP and Robotics where I worked on different projects, mostly on spoken dialogue systems. I moved to Rovereto in 2017 to follow the Master in Cognitive Science, with a track in Human-Machine Interaction at the University of Trento. During my Master I did an internship at the FBK research center in the context of the methodology to evaluate a dialogue system. In July 2019 I graduated. My Master’s Thesis is called “The Embodiment Game: a Methodology to study the effect of Embodiment in Human-Machine Interaction". In September 2019 I started as a PhD student at the University of Twente on the project Avatar-XPrize. I am interested in human-machine interaction, user studies and evaluations, multiparty and multimodal dialogue systems, and teleoperation.

RESEARCH

In September 2019 I started as a PhD student on the project Avatar-XPrize. It is a global competition focused on the development of an Avatar system that will transport a human's sense, actions and presence to a remote location in real time. In the project I am working on the embodiment illusion, namely I study how to improve the ownership, agency and self-location of the user controller.

publications

2018 M. Bruijnes, S. Falcone, “The Embodied Debate Corpus”, “Replicating the replication crisis” - The Workshop on Methodology and/of Evaluation, IVAs 2018, Sydney, Australia

2018 M. Guerini, S. Falcone, B. Magnini, “A Methodology for Evaluating Interaction Strategies of Task-Oriented Conversational Agents”, The 2nd International Workshop on SearchOriented Conversational AI (SCAI), EMNLP 2018, Brussels, Belgium.

2018 F. Cutugno, M. di Maro, S. Falcone, M. Guerini, B. Magnini, A. Origlia, “ItalianDIALogue System evaluation – IDIAL”, EVALITA 2018, 5th Italian Conference on

Computational Linguistics - CLiC-it 2018, Torino, Italy. 2018 M. di Maro, S. Falcone, F. Cutugno, “Prosodic Analysis in Human-Machine Interaction”, Associazione Italiana Scienze della Voce (AISV), 2018, Bolzano, Italy (Best Paper Award).