Rita Cucchiara, (Master’s Degree in Electronic Engineering in 1989, PhD in Computer Engineering in 1992 at the University of Bologna) is since 2005 Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she teaches Artificial Vision and Cognitive Systems.

She is Director of the Interdepartmental Center AIRI (artificial Intelligence Research and Innovation) at the Tecnopolo of Modena, and Scientific Manager of AImageLab, the Research Laboratory in Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Multimedia of the Engineering Department “Enzo Ferrari”. She is Director of ELLIS (European Labs of Learning and Intelligent Systems) Modena’s unity.

She is member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Institute of Technology, member of the ART-ER and Prometeia Board of Directors and a board member of the Foundation on “Future Ai Research”, funded by the PNRR 2021-2026.

She is member of the Advisory Board of the Max Plank Intelligent Systems Institute in Germany, and of the Computer Vision Center in Barcelona.

She was President of the Italian Association on Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (CVPL) in 2015-2018 and Director of the CINI-AIIS National Lab from 2018 to 2021.

Rita Cucchiara collaborates with the Presidency of the Council of Ministers for Artificial Intelligence and is responsible for the working group on Artificial Intelligence of PNR 2021-2027. She has collaborated with MISE, MIUR and MIDT for the drafting of the National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence.

She participates to several European Research projects Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe and is responsible for several applied research projects in partnership with companies and manufacturing industries, also through the “AI Academy” of Modena, co-financed by the Emilia-Romagna Region.

Her research field deals mainly with Artificial Vision and Multimedia Deep Learning, whose results have been published in over 400 international scientific publications.