Anna research activity is on the following three principal research lines of investigation:
1) 1998 to date: Behavioural and contextual analysis of interaction. Semantics and sentiment analysis in dialogues and interactions. Cognitive and Emotional Processes. Cross-modal analysis of speech, gesture, facial and vocal expressions of emotions. Timing perception in language tasks.

2) 1995 to date: Cognitive and computational social information processing. Emotional and social believable Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) . Predictions of oro-facial motions to animate talking faces. Algorithmic and computational issues for the automatic recognition and synthesis of speech and emotions.

3) 1989 to date: Neural Networks: algorithm, models and applications. Incremental Learning. Neural Auditory Processing.

The interdisciplinary research background provided a novel perspective in the field of Human Computer Interaction with applications in Ambient Assistive Technology for improving life quality and developing models for the algorithmic implementation of friendly and emotionally coloured interactive dialog systems and socially believable ICT multimodal interfaces. Particular efforts are devoted to the following aspects:

1. The definition of qualitative and quantitative interactive behavioural (gestural and emotional) features;
2. The development of mathematical models able to describe and measure the quality of human-human interaction accounting for embodied knowledge acquisition and embodied knowledge use
3. The cognitive and psychological support for developing specific rehabilitation tools designed to preserve cognitive and motoric abilities.