Ariel Gjaci

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at IIT with a multidisciplinary background spanning biomedical engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence. I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2018, a Master’s degree in Robotics Engineering in 2022, and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in 2025. During my Ph.D., I focused on culture-aware gesture generation for social robots, applying a range of deep generative and classical machine learning models. My main contributions include:

• Developing TED4C-L, a large-scale multimodal dataset of synchronized audio, text, and gesture data from 737 speakers across four cultures.
• Analyzing cultural patterns in multiple datasets using machine learning techniques such as SVMs, Random Forests, MLPs, VQ-VAEs, and Transformers.
• Designing a culture embedding framework that disentangles cultural identity from speaker identity through domain generalization techniques like Fishr and Adversarial Learning.
• Building a multimodal Diffusion-Transformer model to generate co-speech gestures conditioned on speech, text, and cultural context.
• Developing rule-based algorithms using Semantic Similarity to identify gestures.

Currently, I contribute to the XTREME European Project, working on realistic spatial audio rendering for virtual and augmented reality environments using multimodal learning techniques that combine audio and visual cues.

My research is task-oriented rather than topic-constrained. I enjoy tackling complex challenges across domains, from building autonomous agents and realistic virtual environments to exploring future applications in medicine, such as drug discovery and diagnostics.