Toward Cultural Competence in Social Robotics

In human behavioral studies, cultural competence refers to the ability to recognize, understand, and adapt to diverse cultural contexts. This concept can be extended to artificial systems such as social robots (SRs). In this domain, the absence of cultural competence may lead to inappropriate behaviors, reduced user satisfaction, system failures, and ethical concerns. Although the field has received increasing scholarly attention, several critical challenges remain insufficiently address...

From Design to Real-World Impact: Enhancing Human–Robot Interaction through Personality-Driven Robots

Objective: Personality is a cognitive construct that shapes individuals’ characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, influencing how they interact with others. Consequently, implementing personality in robots can significantly affect Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), shaping key dimensions such as trust, engagement, attention, empathy, and enjoyability. Although psychology lacks a univocal definition of human personality, several theoretical models, such as the Big Five, PEN, H...

Towards Fully Autonomous Inspection with Quadruped Robots in Unstructured and Safety-Critical Environments

Inspection operations in industrial and search-and-rescue (SAR) environments often expose workers to hazardous conditions, including unstable terrain, confined spaces, and partially inaccessible areas. In this context, autonomous robotic systems represent a promising solution for reducing human exposure to risk while increasing operational efficiency. Among mobile robotic platforms, quadruped robots offer significant advantages due to their mobility and ability to operate in complex and unstr...

DINAMICHE DI PICCOLA GUERRA TRA XVI E XVII SECOLO: UNO STUDIO SULLA TRATTATISTICA E SUGLI AUTORI MILITARI COEVI

Early modern warfare has been interpreted through different paradigms, from revolution to evolution and transformation. These debates have encouraged historians to consider different aspects of war, from the institutions managing it to the operations, passing through military cultures and emotions of the soldiers, but not only. Yet, recently the everyday operational conduct of campaigns has received less systematic attention. This thesis investigates it through what it terms ‘small-war dynami...

Dwelling in Dispersal: Logic of Subtraction, Infrastructuring of Endurance, and the Production of Fugitivity along the Belgian-French Route to the UK

This thesis asks how migrants dwell, move, and sustain orientation toward a destination when the state has organized their presence around its impossibility. Its ground is the Belgian-French route to the United Kingdom, where "Dublinized" migrants face an architecture that compels movement while criminalizing it, and erodes the shelter it requires. Dispersal, the thesis argues, is enforcement's mode of operation, not its failure. Three instruments constitute this formation: the Dublin Regu...

Diversity-Aware Social Robots for Education and Social Assistance

Lattices, Isogenies and Adaptor Signatures in Post-Quantum Cryptography

In this thesis we give an analysis of the hierarchical identity-based broadcast encryption scheme proposed by C. Yang, Zheng, Wang, Lu and Y. Yang. The interest in this scheme is due to the fact that it is one of the few of its kind to be Post-Quantum, and relies on the hardness of the LWE, i.e. on lattice-based problems. For the first time we give a detailed description of the scheme and we present a full introduction to the mathematical and cryptographic background needed to describe it. Th...

Haunting the border: passages, horizons and memories of disappearance in Morocco

This thesis examines how disappearance and death at the border continue to produce social, political, and affective effects beyond the moment of loss itself. Situated within disappearance studies and bringing a hauntological approach to bear on border and migration studies, it attends to how violent absence is produced at the border and to what it generates, in terms of political relations, practices of memory, and claims for justice. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted p...

L'ITALIE EN EXPOSITION. Canali di diffusione e affermazione dell'arte italiana contemporanea in Francia (1959-1981)

La tesi analizza le relazioni transnazionali tra Italia e Francia, attraverso i canali di affermazione dell’arte contemporanea italiana nell’ambiente culturale francese nel periodo 1959-1981. Adottando la prospettiva degli exhibition studies, la ricerca indaga le mostre collettive come "dispositivi" politici, sociali e culturali utilizzati dall'Italia per ridefinire il proprio posizionamento internazionale e promuovere un'immagine di modernità aggiornata . Lo studio si articola attraverso l'e...