Interviews with the Partners of the VERA Research Project - Nicole Dalia Cilia, Principal Investigator and Professor at 'KORE' University of Enna

🎥 In the coming weeks, we will be sharing a series of interviews with the partners of the VERA Research Project.

These interviews provide an opportunity to explore the project’s goals, challenges, and potential impact, offering a deeper understanding of the opportunities it creates.

We are pleased to begin this series with Professor Nicole Dalia Cilia, Principal Investigator of the VERA Project.

Watch the video below to hear her perspective and stay tuned for the next interviews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AArs8UOisAg

Interview:

"I’m Nicole Cilia, an associate professor of Information Processing Systems at the University of Ennacore, and I’m particularly involved in the Department of Engineering and Architecture, focusing on research into systems based on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning applied to medicine.

This project is based on an interregional Italy-Malta call funded by the European Union and is structured in agreement with five partners, three Italian partners, in particular the University of Ennacore, which is the project’s partner leader and I am the project’s principal investigator, the University of Palermo with two departments, the Department of Physics and the Department of Medicine and the CNR of Parma.

We also have the support of two institutions in Malta, the University of Malta and the Ministry of Health of Malta.

Each partner within the project has a specific role.

The project takes within itself the theories, the embedded cognition theories, according to which cognition is detectable by bodily movements.

According to these assumptions, it was thought to use body movements as traces of an underlying cognitive construct that could be revealed by wearable sensors.

In particular, the project focuses on Alzheimer’s disease.

As I was saying, each partner has a specific role.

In addition to managing the project and coordinating it, the University of “KORE” in Enna also oversees the development of artificial intelligence to support diagnosis and treatment, and the data acquisition platform through wearable sensors developed for the project itself.

The University of Palermo, with its souls, therefore the Department of Physics and the Department of Medicine, has the objective of on the one hand integrating the sensors that will be developed ad hoc by the CNR of Parma and the Department of Medicine.

In addition to submitting applications to the Ethics Committee and establishing experimental protocols, the aim is to support the project through data acquisition, recruitment, and acquisition, including the recruitment of healthy patients and controls and data from people with cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s patients, and healthy subjects.

Finally, the University of Malta will be responsible for recruiting the same target audience in Malta, and the Ministry of Health of Malta is providing support in the Maltese-side project management and patient enrollment phase, thus also making healthcare facilities available to recruit individuals.

As I was saying, the project responds to a European Union call for proposals that starts from a need.

The need is to fill gaps at international level on the possibility of early diagnosis but also of treatment of particular neurodegenerative disorders that today we know is increasing given the advancement of the European population and we aim precisely to respond to this need by creating protocols both to support early diagnosis through non-invasive systems and to treat within a virtual reality in which an artificial intelligence can guide and personalize the treatment.

This is for the project as I was saying it has two great souls the clinical one and the engineering one.

So the expected results concern both the practically IT and clinical parts.

In particular, there is a strong direction towards research with regard to IT.

Therefore, the expected impact is also in terms of the development of increasingly robust intelligent systems that are reliable with machine learning techniques that allow the integration of the acquired data from the sensors we will have available.

As regards the clinic, however, it is expected that an intelligent platform can be built that can support not only Italian-Maltese and therefore European hospitals and facilities in general according to European Union Agreements but that can also return to the patient and the citizen an initial screening platform that therefore shortens waiting times for clinical tests or that can be used also easily at home as a first screening support training exercise

neurocognitive and which can then eliminate those shortcomings that have been found through targeted treatments.

The project has an idea that was born years ago that I have been working on for a long time.

It is difficult in research to put personalities together.

The project was born from an idea that was developed years ago and has only received positive feedback in the last year.

The difficulty in proposing and seeing a project of this type realized always lies in the difficulty of bringing together very different figures.

I was talking a little while ago about engineers and doctors.

However, within this project, it has been going on for a year, despite the initial difficulties, if they can be defined as such, in communication, and therefore in finding a common language.

We are managing to advance both aspects with communication that can benefit and does not neglect clinicians and computer scientists.

The design idea came about many years or a few years ago and it comes from the fact that I have a philosophical background that actually turned into an engineering background over time.

I studied cognitive science a lot, I approached medicine first from the side of artificial intelligence philosophically, that is, trying to understand what the basics were cognitive for some decision-making processes, and then on the engineering side, specializing more in artificial intelligence techniques than how some cognitive functions could be revealed from body movements.

So I always found it very difficult to make these parts of knowledge dialogue, they were as if they were many branches diversified knowledge that did not have bridges with each other.

Only in the last year have I had the opportunity to actually put this body of knowledge into practice and see a European-based project funded that could make room for something that could also have a strong social impact and that would allow people with different figures to communicate who were then brought into the project by a set of circumstances.

I think it’s a great personal gratification, especially if, as I hope, this project leads to the use of a socially useful, clinical tool; it can help people in difficulty get closer to clinical practice, to take better care of themselves easily from the comfort of their homes through a very powerful technology behind it."