Entrance of the UNIMORE AI Center, home of the Modena ELLIS Unit

The Unit

The Modena ELLIS Unit

Established on 1 September 2020, the Unit brings together the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, the University of Florence and CINECA to advance research in machine learning and computer vision across Europe.

Established
2020
EU projects
9
Publications since 2020
750+
Institutions
3

Our Mission

The Modena ELLIS Unit supports foundational research in machine learning and computer vision at European level, works with industry to increase the impact of research, and trains the next generation of European AI talent.

Directed by Prof. Rita Cucchiara, the Unit is a founding member of the Emilia-Romagna Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and was renewed by ELLIS in 2026 for another five-year term.

  1. Research excellence

    Curiosity-driven research published in top venues, carried out together with the other ELLIS Units through shared datasets, infrastructure and open problems.

  2. Impact on industry

    Joint labs, European projects and the Modena AI Academy connect our research with companies and start-ups, also through the BI-REX Competence Center.

  3. Talent and education

    Master and PhD programmes, ELLIS schools and researcher exchanges, hosted in Modena, Florence and at the CINECA supercomputing centre.

Research Areas

Our research spans foundational and applied machine learning, carried out within European, national and international projects.

Computer Vision

Visual recognition, video understanding, 3D perception and human behaviour analysis.

Large-Scale AI and Multimedia

Multimodal foundation models that connect vision and language, trained on high-performance computing infrastructures.

Trustworthy AI

Robust, explainable and safe models, in collaboration with the ELSA and ELLE European networks.

Resilient and Continual Learning

Continual, incremental and online learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning and model merging: the foundations for deep models that keep improving after deployment, without forgetting and without changing their base architecture.

Robotics and Embodied AI

Robots that learn from demonstrations and interact with people, agents that navigate 3D environments following natural language instructions, and Vision-Language-Action models.

Health and Bioinformatics

AI for medicine, healthcare and computational biology.

European Networks

The Unit is a partner of four European networks on AI research and doctoral training, funded by the European Union.

ELSA

European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI

Horizon Europe · Network of Excellence

A network of excellence built on ELLIS that leads foundational research on safe and secure AI: robustness, privacy and human oversight.

elsa-ai.eu

ELIAS

European Lighthouse of AI for Sustainability

Horizon Europe · Network of Excellence

Builds on ELLIS to make Europe a leader in AI research for sustainable innovation, serving the planet, society and individuals.

elias-ai.eu

ELLIOT

European Large Open Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Robust Generalization on Arbitrary Data Streams

Horizon Europe · 2025–2029

Develops open, trustworthy multimodal foundation models. Modena hosted the 2026 plenary meeting and a public workshop.

elliot-ai.eu

ELLE

European Doctoral Network on Secure and Safe AI in the Age of Foundation Models

MSCA Doctoral Network · from 2027

Trains 15 doctoral candidates on robustness, privacy, interpretability and the adaptation of AI systems.

CORDIS
Funded by the European Union

People

Institutions

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

The Unit is hosted at the UNIMORE AI Center of the “Enzo Ferrari” Department of Engineering, home of AImageLab, the inter-departmental centre AIRI and the AI Academy.

unimore.it

CINECA

The Italian consortium for high-performance computing, based in Bologna and home of the EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputer Leonardo. It provides computing resources, technical support and internships to the Unit.

cineca.it
The Leonardo supercomputer at CINECA

NVIDIA AI Technology Centre

Created in December 2019 within the NVIDIA “AI Nation” programme signed by CINI and NVIDIA, NVAITC@UNIMORE supports computationally intensive research carried out jointly by UNIMORE and NVIDIA.

Coordinated by Prof. Rita Cucchiara, with the technical direction of Prof. Lorenzo Baraldi and Giuseppe Fiameni (NVIDIA), the centre works on video understanding, multimodal and transformer-based models and self-supervised learning, using the GPU facilities of CINECA.

Contact

Address
UNIMORE AI Center
“Enzo Ferrari” Department of Engineering
Via P. Vivarelli, 10
41125 Modena, Italy
Email
segreteria.aimagelab@unimore.it
Phone
+39 059 205 8774