Gustavo Marfia is Full Professor of Computer Science at the Department of the Arts of the University of Bologna, where he also serves as Research Delegate. He is the founder and scientific director of VARLab – Virtual and Augmented Reality Lab and General Coordinator of UPRAISE, a €16 million Digital Europe project. His research focuses on extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence, digital twins, distributed simulation, and human factors. He is also co-founder, Chair of the Board of Directors, and legal representative of Effingo S.r.l., an innovative start-up backed by the University of Bologna through BeHold.
In 2019, he established VARLab with an initial core team of two people and grew it into a group of approximately 15–20 members, recruiting both Italian and international researchers. He developed experimental infrastructure, established structured supervision and professional development pathways, and secured more than €3 million in funding for research, innovation, and technology transfer. Within a few years, VARLab established a regular presence at the most prominent and competitive international XR conferences, including ACM VRST, IEEE VR, and IEEE ISMAR.
As scientific director of VARLab, he coordinates an interdisciplinary team of researchers, research fellows, doctoral candidates, and collaborators, organising its activities across fundamental research, prototyping, user studies, industrial collaboration, and advanced training. The laboratory’s work integrates recruitment, skills development, scientific output, experimental infrastructure, and the acquisition of new funding.
As Research Delegate of the Department of the Arts, he contributes to defining the Department’s research strategy, promoting participation in competitive funding calls, building interdisciplinary collaborations, and enhancing the quality and impact of its research activities.
LEADERSHIP OF EUROPEAN PROGRAMMES AND PROJECTS
UPRAISE – Virtual Worlds Innovation Masters: Shaping Future Digital Skills Europe (https://dar.unibo.it/en/research/research-projects/upraise-virtual-worlds-innovation-masters-shaping-future-digital-skills-europe)
Consortium Coordinator and Principal Investigator | Digital Europe | 2025–2029 | €16 million
As General Coordinator and Principal Investigator, he leads a partnership of 26 beneficiaries and nine associated partners across eleven European countries. He oversees consortium governance, alignment among work packages, the planning of activities and resources, the monitoring of risks and indicators, quality assurance, and relations with the European Commission.
UPRAISE develops university programmes and advanced modules in extended reality, artificial intelligence, digital twins, blockchain, and the Internet of Things, including applications in manufacturing. The programme is expected to deliver more than 2,500 academic qualifications and over 1,600 modular certifications, supported by immersive laboratories, AI-based personalisation tools, and train-the-trainer programmes.
OTHER RESEARCH, INNOVATION, AND INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS
MICS – Made in Italy Circular and Sustainable (https://www.mics.tech/)
Technical Lead | PNRR | 2023–2025
He led the technical activities of the University of Bologna unit in XR, digital twins, advanced digitalisation, and human-centred evaluation for industrial and manufacturing contexts, connecting prototype development, knowledge transfer, and application validation.
HyperModeLex – Hyperdimensional Modelling of the Legal System in Digital Society (https://site.unibo.it/hypermodelex/en)
Research Team Member | ERC Advanced Grant | 2022–2027 | €2.5 million
As a member of the team coordinated by Professor Monica Palmirani, he contributes to the integration of XR, HCI, and legal studies. He is a co-author of XR4LAW (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677386.3688891), a study of immersive interfaces for legislative and deliberative institutions presented at the 2024 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction.
HERO-IG – Health and Education Research through Open Innovation in Gaming (https://eit-culture-creativity.eu/latest-news/2026-01-12-eit-culture-creativity-announces-selected-projects-2025-education-call)
Project Team Member | EIT Culture & Creativity | 2026–2027
He participates in the project coordinated by Professor Mariagrazia Benassi, which focuses on international doctoral training in applied gaming for education and health, integrating XR, AI, entrepreneurial skills, and university–industry collaboration.
ATLANTE (https://www.unibo.it/it/ricerca/progetti-e-iniziative/pr-fesr-emilia-romagna-2021-2027/1223/20430/20672)
Research Unit Coordinator | PR ERDF Emilia-Romagna | 2024–2026
He coordinated the research unit’s activities in artificial intelligence, data and 3D model pipelines, XR systems, and user-experience evaluation, overseeing scientific responsibility, organisation, and delivery.
RADICI (https://www.unibo.it/it/ricerca/progetti-e-iniziative/pr-fesr-emilia-romagna-2021-2027/1223/20430/20509)
Research Unit Coordinator | PR ERDF Emilia-Romagna | 2024–2026
He coordinated activities on data interoperability, digital environments, and distributed collaboration, overseeing work planning, coordination with project partners, and the technical and scientific quality of the unit’s contributions.
Infrastructure for Immersive and Distributed Environments (https://site.unibo.it/varlab/en)
Scientific Lead | Alma Attrezzature 2017, University of Bologna | €138,172 in funding
He secured and coordinated the competitive grant that established the technological foundation for the development of immersive and distributed environments and VARLab’s subsequent growth.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
Effingo S.r.l. (https://site.unibo.it/behold/it/spin-off-unibo/effingo)
Co-founder, Chair of the Board of Directors, and legal representative | innovative start-up backed by the University of Bologna through BeHold | since 2025
He contributes to defining the company’s strategy and development model, corporate governance, relations with shareholders and partners, and the market exploitation of expertise developed through research on generative artificial intelligence, computer vision, and photorealistic digital identities.
INDUSTRIAL COLLABORATIONS
He has coordinated several collaborations with companies in extended reality, artificial intelligence, computer vision, digital twins, and remote assistance, overseeing activities from requirements definition and feasibility studies through prototyping, experimentation, and user evaluation.
INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIONS AND SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES
He has developed collaborations with research groups at the University of Cambridge, Miami University, the University of Washington, TU Graz, Macao Polytechnic University, Sorbonne Université, and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, resulting in joint publications, researcher exchanges, and shared experiments. From 2013 to 2018, he coordinated a joint group with the Joint Research Center in Ubiquitous Computing at the Macao Polytechnic Institute; since 2025, through UPRAISE, he has led 26 beneficiaries and nine associated partners across eleven European countries.
In 2024, he presented research at IEEE VR in Orlando and IEEE ISMAR in the Greater Seattle Area, and he is a member of the IEEE ISMAR 2026 Technical Program Committee. He has held co-chair roles for IEEE/IFIP MedHocNet, ACM MobileHealth, ACM MobiCom, and ACM MobiSys and served on the Technical Program Committees of IEEE MetaCom, IEEE WCNC, IEEE MASS, and IEEE/ACM DS-RT. He has been an invited speaker at the University of Southern California, Karlstad University, and the Austrian Institute of Technology. At AINTEC 2011 in Bangkok (https://interlab.ait.ac.th/aintec2011/program.php), he delivered the invited talk “From Theory to Reality: Testing an Accident Warning System on a Real Highway Scenario”.
From 2004 to 2009, he earned his PhD while working as a Graduate Student Researcher at UCLA’s Network Research Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Mario Gerla, contributing to NIS-ITA, a research programme funded by the US and UK governments. He conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Microsoft Research Cambridge and returned to UCLA as a Visiting Scholar from 2011 to 2014. During this collaboration, he led the University of Bologna team in the Talking Cars project, which developed a large-scale testbed for car-to-car communications and received international media coverage, including from BBC News (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-14125245) and Sky News (https://news.sky.com/story/talking-cars-could-reduce-road-crashes-10487145). From 2002 to 2004, he worked at Siemens Mobile Communications Research Labs, where he filed European patent EP1672867A1.
SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY AND SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
He is the author or co-author of more than 170 scientific publications. His most recent research concerns the use of XR, AI, and digital twins for procedural skills transfer, simulation and training, conversational agents, multimodal interaction, remote collaboration, and human-factors evaluation. His work has appeared at venues including IEEE VR, IEEE ISMAR, and ACM VRST—where, in 2025, a paper produced by the group he leads received the Best Paper Award—as well as in Virtual Reality (Springer) and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. His earlier research includes contributions on vehicular networks, transport protocols, and distributed systems published in, among others, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Communications Magazine, and Computer Networks.
From 2019 to 2020, he served as Director of the University Master’s programme in Innovation in eXtended Reality (MIXR). Training is now integrated into the strategy of the European projects he coordinates, with particular attention to advanced digital skills development, train-the-trainer activities, project-based learning, and connections among universities, companies, and European skills-certification systems.
He supervises doctoral candidates funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC), Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), COFUND programmes, and regional grants, as well as through ministerial and industry-funded scholarships, integrating them into interdisciplinary research pathways and international scientific collaborations.
EDUCATION AND ACADEMIC CAREER
He received his degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Pisa in July 2003, graduating with 110/110 cum laude, and his PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in December 2009, where he defended the dissertation P2P Intelligent Transportation Systems: Mobility, Fairness and Scalability.
From 2009 to 2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bologna. In 2012, he joined the Department for Life Quality Studies, and since 2021 he has been a member of the Department of the Arts, where he has served as Full Professor and Research Delegate since November 2023.
Updated September 2026.
