Francesco Ragusa

Francesco Ragusa is a Research Fellow at the University of Catania, Italy, holding an Industrial Doctorate in Computer Science (2021). He spent part of his PhD at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. His work focuses on First Person (Egocentric) Vision, including Human-Object Interaction, Industrial Applications, and Augmented Reality. He co-founded NEXT VISION s.r.l., an academic spin-off from the University of Catania since 2021. Key projects include the MECCANO dataset for industrial human-object interactions and the EGO-EXO4D initiative analyzing skilled human activity from multi-perspective views.

Research interests span Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, and Machine Learning. He contributed to seminal datasets like MECCANO and ENIGMA-51, advancing understanding of human behavior in industrial settings. His work emphasizes practical applications, such as wearable assistive systems and visual navigation solutions.

Ragusa has delivered tutorials at major conferences (e.g., ICIAP, VISIGRAPP) on First Person Vision’s history, challenges, and trends. He actively promotes industrial collaborations and has secured grants including PNRR MUR (Code E63C22001940006) and EU funding under Next Generation EU.

His teaching and professional activities include organizing workshops on egocentric vision for AI-driven assistants and industrial safety systems. Current research directions involve multimodal synthetic data utilization, gaze-based interaction analysis, and cross-modal fusion for human-robot collaboration.