Curriculum Vitae · Last updated September 2026

Mirko Casu

AI Researcher and Licensed Psychologist.
I study the human–AI relationship and its clinical and forensic applications.

Portrait of Mirko Casu

Profile

PhD in Computer Science at the University of Catania (IPLab, 2023–2026), recently a visiting researcher at EPFL, and a licensed clinical psychologist. I introduced the concept of impostor bias, a systematic suspicion that what we see online is AI-generated, fuelled by our awareness of what generative AI can do. My work now centres on language models and AI agents, with a focus on mental health and AI safety.

Research threads

Humans vs. synthetic media

Impostor and automation bias; deepfake detection and attribution benchmarks.

AI for mental health

Chatbots, VR, wearables and mHealth apps for addiction, eating disorders and trauma.

LLMs & AI safety

Evaluation bias in diffusion vs. autoregressive LLMs; human–AI conversational trajectories; psychological profiling of open models.

Experience

Aug 2023 –
Jul 2026

PhD Researcher, Computer Science

IPLab, University of Catania · Catania, IT
  • Designed and ran a 746-participant mixed-methods study showing human accuracy at spotting AI images sits at chance (47–55.5%), with measurable impostor and automation bias.
  • Co-built WILD (20,000 images, 20 generators) and SynthForensics (6,815 videos, 5 text-to-video models), benchmarks where state-of-the-art detectors lose up to 29 AUC points.
  • Led a scoping review of 49 studies on wearables, apps and ML for smoking detection and cessation (IEEE JBHI).
  • SAMOTHRACE project: AI for wearables and cognitive bias in forensics.
Oct 2025 –
Mar 2026

Visiting Doctoral Researcher

MINTS Lab, EPFL · Lausanne, CH · supervisor Prof. Andrea Cavallaro
  • Analysed conversational trajectories between humans and AI systems.
  • Studied evaluation bias in diffusion LLMs vs. autoregressive LLMs; paper under submission to EACL 2027.
2021 –
2023

Before the PhD

  • Specialist assistant for pupils with disabilities (I Girasoli coop.); clinical trainee in applied psychoanalysis (APA Catania); videomaker (UniCT, ECLAT & CoEHAR).

Education

  • Aug 2023 – Jul 2026PhD, Computer Science · University of Catania · defence pending · advisor Prof. S. Battiato · thesis: Human Behaviour as Target and Medium of Artificial Intelligence in Clinical and Forensic Contexts
  • 2020 – 2023MSc, Clinical Psychology · University of Catania · 110/110 cum laude · thesis on a smoking-cessation app (published in BMC Psychology)
  • 2015 – 2019BSc, Psychological Sciences · University of Sassari · 105/110 · thesis on video games, violence, rehabilitation and addiction

Selected publications

FSI: DI2024

GenAI mirage: The impostor bias and the deepfake detection challenge in the era of artificial illusions

M. Casu, L. Guarnera, P. Caponnetto, S. Battiato · Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation

INTERPOLIntroduces impostor bias; cited in INTERPOL guidelines.

Appl. Sci.2024

AI Chatbots for Mental Health: A Scoping Review of Effectiveness, Feasibility, and Applications

M. Casu, S. Triscari, S. Battiato, L. Guarnera, P. Caponnetto · Applied Sciences

UK ParliamentMost-cited paper (280+ citations); in POSTnote 737.

HBET2025

A (Mid)journey Through Reality: Assessing Accuracy, Impostor Bias, and Automation Bias in Human Detection of AI-Generated Images

M. Casu, L. Guarnera, I. Zangara, P. Caponnetto, S. Battiato · Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies

746 participants, 5 variants, Grad-CAM vs. humans. Open code.

Psych. Int.2024

Exploring the Therapeutic Potential of Virtual Reality: A Review on the Simulation of Psychedelic Effects for Treating Psychological Disorders

M. Casu, C. Farrauto, G. Farruggio, S. Bellissima, S. Battiato, P. Caponnetto · Psychology International

VR-simulated psychedelic states as therapy; basis of my DigiTales talk.

IEEE JBHI2025

Smoking Detection and Cessation: An Updated Scoping Review of Digital and Mobile Health Technologies

M. Casu, F. Guarnera, G. R. M. La Rosa, S. Battiato, P. Caponnetto, R. Polosa, R. Emma · IEEE J. Biomedical and Health Informatics
CHBR2026

Digital technologies and artificial intelligence in eating disorders: A scoping review

M. Casu, L. Marletta, C. V. Ragaglia, P. Caponnetto, S. Battiato · Computers in Human Behavior Reports

7,545 records ranked by an LLM (Nemotron) for human screening.

Book ch.2026

Sistemi di IA ad alto rischio di cui all'Articolo 6, Paragrafo 2

M. Casu, A. Di Pierno, O. Pontorno, I. Zangara, L. Guarnera, S. Battiato, D. Curtotti · in AI Act e Legge nazionale sull'Intelligenza Artificiale (Giuffrè)

Full list of 28 works, with PDFs and code: mirkocasu.github.io/publications

Open models & data

  • 2026Apertus 1.5 8B for Apple silicon: 9 MLX quantizations (text & vision) of the Swiss open LLM, benchmarked for perplexity and psychological profile (PsychoBench, ICLR 2024) · 2,100+ downloads last month
  • 2026A (Mid)journey dataset: 75 stimuli and 11,170 human judgments, with Grad-CAM maps · Hugging Face & GitHub

Community & service

  • 2026Session Chair, Technical Session 6 · IEEE ICAISF 2026, Catania
  • 2025Track Co-Chair, DFF-2025 Deepfake Forensics Workshop · ACM MM 2025
  • 2025Dataset Committee, AADD-2025 challenge (13 teams) · ACM MM 2025
  • 2025Lead Organizer, FHDA challenge · IEEE MetroXRAINE 2025
  • 2023 – 25Guest Editor (2023–25) & Academic Editor (2024–25), special issue (4 articles) · Exploration of Digital Health Technologies
  • 2023 – nowPeer reviewer for MDPI (Healthcare, IJERPH, Psychiatry Int.)
  • 2024 – 26Speaker & staff, IFOSS Forensics Summer School (3 editions)