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Mirko Casu

AI Researcher · Licensed Clinical Psychologist

Profile

AI researcher and licensed clinical psychologist, finishing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Catania. Builds and evaluates AI systems that observe, imitate or judge human behaviour: bias in LLM judges, synthetic-media forensics (NeurIPS 2026), and wearable and conversational AI for mental health. Currently AI research consultant at Eternal Tech; visiting researcher at EPFL in 2025–26; first-author work referenced by INTERPOL and the UK Parliament.

Experience

AI Research Consultant · Eternal Tech, Acireale, Italy Sep 2026 – Present
Company building AI infrastructure for digital identity, persistent memory and intelligent agents
  • Design the evaluation methodology and criteria for a proprietary AI technology, and build the benchmarking system that applies them
  • Analyse the technology's architecture and write the scientific manuscript reporting its evaluation
Visiting Doctoral Researcher · MINTS Lab, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland Oct 2025 – Mar 2026
Host Prof. Andrea Cavallaro
  • Ran a controlled comparison of diffusion and autoregressive LLMs as automated judges, characterising their evaluation biases; submitted to EACL 2027
  • Analysed conversational trajectories between people and AI assistants
PhD Researcher · IPLab, University of Catania, Catania, Italy Aug 2023 – Jul 2026
SAMOTHRACE project · AI for wearables and cognitive bias in forensics
  • Built ORION, an end-to-end pipeline that detects smoking episodes from wrist motion sensors (manuscript under review)
  • Introduced the impostor bias, a systematic doubt that real media are authentic, and validated it with 746 participants whose accuracy at spotting AI images sat at chance (47–55.5%)
  • Co-built two forensic benchmarks, WILD (20,000 images, 20 generators) and SynthForensics (6,815 videos, 5 text-to-video models; NeurIPS 2026), on which state-of-the-art detectors lose 29 AUC points on average
  • Co-developed an on-device autism screening pipeline from children's gaze, distilled into a 1.6M-parameter ONNX ensemble that runs offline in an open-source Android app
  • Led scoping reviews on AI chatbots for mental health (300+ citations, cited in UK Parliament POSTnote 737), wearables for smoking detection (49 studies, IEEE JBHI) and AI for eating disorders (7,545 records ranked by an LLM)

Selected publications

  1. SynthForensics: Benchmarking and Evaluating People-Centric Synthetic Video Deepfakes
    R. Leotta, S. A. Sambataro, C. V. Ragaglia, M. Casu, Y. Petralia, F. Guarnera, L. Guarnera, S. Battiato · In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Evaluations & Datasets Track, 2026 · Accepted, to appear
  1. Protocol-Aware, On-Device Per-Image ASD Classification on Saliency4ASD via Multi-Stream Distillation
    M. O. Spata, M. Casu, F. Rundo, S. Battiato · IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society, 2026
  1. 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, 2025
    746 participants; open data and code
  1. WILD: a new in-the-Wild Image Linkage Dataset for synthetic image attribution
    P. Bongini, S. Mandelli, A. Montibeller, M. Casu, et al. (17 authors) · In 2025 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2025
  1. 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, 2024
    Cited in UK Parliament POSTnote 737; most-cited paper (300+ citations)
  1. 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, 2024
    Introduced the impostor bias; referenced by INTERPOL (Project SynthWave)

29 publications in total, with PDFs and code, at mirkocasu.github.io/publications

Open models and software

Skills

Education

PhD, Computer Science · University of Catania · defence pending 2023 – 2026
Thesis: Human Behaviour as Target and Medium of Artificial Intelligence in Clinical and Forensic Contexts
MSc, Clinical Psychology · University of Catania 2020 – 2023
BSc, Psychological Sciences · University of Sassari 2015 – 2019
Licensed Psychologist · Order of Psychologists of Sicily, Section A, reg. no. 12260 since Sep 2024

Service and talks