Piera Riccio

PhD Student

Piera Riccio photo

Piera Riccio was an ELLIS PhD student, she succefully completed it in September of 2025, with a thesis titled “Human Aesthetics under the representational power of Artificial Intelligence”.

In her PhD, she focused on the effect that social media have on the lives of women and the way they are perceived in the social media cultural ecosystem. Her supervisors we Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Alicante), Thomas Hofmann (ETH Zurich) and Miguel Angel Lozano (Universidad de Alicante).

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Cinema and Media Engineering (2018, Politecnico di Torino), a Master’s degree in ICT for Smart Societies (2021, Politecnico di Torino), and a Master’s degree in Data Science and Engineering (2021, Télécom Paris – EURECOM). In 2020, she was an affiliate at Metalab (at) Harvard. In 2021, she was a research assistant at the Oslo Metropolitan University. In her research, she is interested in exploring the cultural, social, and artistic possibilities of AI.

Google Scholar
Link to ORCID profile: ORCID iD icon https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8602-8271

Publications in association with ELLIS Alicante

2026

01/25
Riccio, P., Galati, F., Schweighofer, K., Garcia, N., & Oliver, N. (2026). ImageSet2Text: Describing Sets of Images through Text. Proceedings of the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on AI.

2025

09/22
Alicante, ES
Riccio, P (2025, September). Human aesthetics under the representational power of Artificial Intelligence. In PhD Thesis, University of Alicante.
Thesis Defense
08/22
Honolulu, US
Riccio, P., Domene Garcia, L., & Oliver, N. (2025). Towards Accessible Image Set Descriptions with ImageSet2Text. Workshop on Vision Foundation Models and Generative AI for Accessibility: Challenges and Opportunities.
07/17
Vancouver, CA
Doh, M., Höltgen, B., Riccio, P., & Oliver, N. (2025, July). Position: The Categorization of Race in ML is a Flawed Premise. In ICML'25: International Conference on Machine Learning.
Poster Spotlight
03/25
Riccio, P., Galati, F., Schweighofer, K., Garcia, N., & Oliver, N. (2025). ImageSet2Text: Describing Sets of Images through Text. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.19361.

2024

09/29
Milan, IT
Riccio, P., Curto, G., & Oliver, N. (2024, September). Exploring the Boundaries of Content Moderation in Text-to-Image Generation. In Critical evaluation of generative models and their impact on society (CEGIS) workshop at ECCV.
09/29
Milan, IT
Riccio, P., Curto, G., Hofmann, T., & Oliver, N. (2024, September). An Art-centric perspective on AI-based content moderation of nudity. In Artificial Intelligence for Visual Arts (AI4VA) workshop at ECCV.
05/11
Riccio, P., Hofmann, T., & Oliver, N. (2024, May). Exposed or Erased: Algorithmic Censorship of Nudity in Art. In CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-17).
04/19
Riccio, P., Colin, J., Ogolla, S., & Oliver, N. (2024). Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the whitest of all? Racial biases in social media beauty filters. Social Media and Society, 10(2), 20563051241239296.
Top 5% of research outputs scored by Altmetric
03/31
Riccio, P., & Oliver, N. (2024, March). A Techno-Feminist Perspective on the Algorithmic Censorship of Artistic Nudity. In Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History (Vol. 3).

2023

02/18
Riccio, P., & Oliver, N. (2023, February). Racial Bias in the Beautyverse: Evaluation of Augmented-Reality Beauty Filters. In European Conference on Computer Vision 2022 (Vol. 13803, pp. 714-721).

2022

07/19
Riccio, P., Psomas, B., Galati, F., Escolano, F., Hofmann, T., & Oliver, N. (2022, July). OpenFilter: A Framework to Democratize Research Access to Social Media AR Filters. In 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Datasets and Benchmarks Track.
06/27
Riccio, P., Oliver, J. L., Escolano, F., & Oliver, N. (2022, June). Algorithmic Censorship of Art: A Proposed Research Agenda. In 13th International Conference on Computational Creativity.
04/15
Riccio, P., Galati, F., Zuluaga, M. A., De Martin, J. C., & Nichele, S. (2022, April). Translating Emotions from EEG to Visual Arts. In International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (Part of EvoStar) (pp. 243-258).

2021

09/16
Riccio, P., Bergaust, K., Christensen-Scheel, B., De Martin, J. C., Zuluaga, M. A., & Nichele, S. (2021, September). AI-based artistic representation of emotions from EEG signals: a discussion on fairness, inclusion, and aesthetics. In Politics of the Machines.