Vittorio Perera

Hey there , I’m Vittorio, or Vic to most people. I’m a Senior AI Research Engineer in the Petroni Lab at EMBL Rome. We work on AI for scientific discovery, building systems that combine multimodal reasoning, tool use, knowledge retrieval, and lab-in-the-loop interaction to help speed up how science gets done.

I’m new to life sciences, but applying AI to an unfamiliar domain (and learning about it as I go) is exactly what drew me to EMBL. My background is in AI-powered voice agents, starting with robotics during my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon (with Prof. Manuela Veloso), then consumer voice AI on Alexa at Amazon, and B2B voice AI at a startup (Tenyx) and Salesforce after the acquisition.

Outside of work, I’m a dog owner, an avid but slow cyclist, and an unapologetic ARPG enjoyer. In 2024 I got a taste of bicycle touring on RAGBRAI, and I’ve been plotting the next trip ever since (even if life keeps getting in the way ).

news

Jul 13, 2026	I’ve joined EMBL Rome! I’m excited to apply AI to a brand new domain for me, life sciences, and looking forward to the learning curve that comes with it. t sAnd it’s a welcome return to Rome!
Jul 09, 2025	Pardon the dust! I’m currently moving the website from Bluehost to GitHub Pages and taking the opportunity to give it a little makeover. Over the next few days, some pages may still show content from the original template—thanks for your patience!
Oct 01, 2024	It’s official — Tenyx has been acquired by Salesforce! I’m incredibly excited about this milestone and what it means for our future. I’m looking forward to building voice agents with the power and scale of a company like Salesforce behind us!

selected publications

arXiv

EMBL AI Librarian: Life-Sciences Knowledge Layer for AI Agents

Luigi Sigillo, Matteo Silvestri, Francesco Tabaro, and 9 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.28229, 2026

Bib

@article{sigillo2026qlibrarian,
  title = {EMBL AI Librarian: Life-Sciences Knowledge Layer for AI Agents},
  author = {Sigillo, Luigi and Silvestri, Matteo and Tabaro, Francesco and Bhatnagar, Rajat and Mubashar, Syed Irtaza and Jeffryes, Matt and Nijjer, Daljit and Perera, Vittorio and Spjuth, Ola and Saez-Rodriguez, Julio and Harrison, Melissa and Petroni, Fabio},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.28229},
  year = {2026},
}

INLG

Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation

Yuheng Du, Shereen Oraby, Vittorio Perera, and 5 more authors

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, 2020

Bib

@inproceedings{du-etal-2020-schema,
  title = {Schema-Guided Natural Language Generation},
  author = {Du, Yuheng and Oraby, Shereen and Perera, Vittorio and Shen, Minmin and Narayan-Chen, Anjali and Chung, Tagyoung and Venkatesh, Anushree and Hakkani-Tur, Dilek},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
}

AAAI

Multi-Task Learning for Parsing the Alexa Meaning Representation Language

Vittorio Perera, Tagyoung Chung, Thomas Kollar, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI-18), 2018

Bib

@inproceedings{perera2018multi,
  title = {Multi-Task Learning for Parsing the Alexa Meaning Representation Language},
  author = {Perera, Vittorio and Chung, Tagyoung and Kollar, Thomas and Strubell, Emma},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Second {AAAI} Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI-18)},
  year = {2018},
  publisher = {{AAAI} Press},
}

Robotics

Learning Task Knowledge from Dialog and Web Access

Vittorio Perera, Robin Soetens, Thomas Kollar, and 5 more authors

Robotics, 2015

Bib

@article{perera2015learning,
  title = {Learning Task Knowledge from Dialog and Web Access},
  author = {Perera, Vittorio and Soetens, Robin and Kollar, Thomas and Samadi, Mehdi and Sun, Yichao and Nardi, Daniele and van de Molengraft, Ren{\'e} and Veloso, Manuela},
  journal = {Robotics},
  year = {2015},
  publisher = {Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute},
}