Fabio Catania

Fabio Catania is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work focuses on developing conversational agents and AI systems tailored for neurodevelopmental disorders, emotion recognition in speech, and inclusive technology design. He has pioneered projects such as the Emozionalmente Italian emotional speech corpus and the Emoty conversational agent for individuals with autism spectrum disorder.

Research Interests:

• AI-driven therapeutic interventions for neurodevelopmental disorders
• Multimodal emotion recognition systems
• Design of accessible conversational interfaces for marginalized groups
• Linguistic and acoustic analysis of non-verbal communication cues

Key Contributions:

• Developed AI tools like Smemo (multimodal interface for children's creativity) and OK, DNA! (genomic data explorer)
• Created voice-controlled music production systems for motor-impaired users
• Explored irony and sarcasm detection through multimodal analysis

His work bridges computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, and clinical applications, with a focus on creating ethical and inclusive AI systems for healthcare and education contexts.