Sense-Maiking is a research institute born from a simple yet powerful idea.
with the power and speed of artificial intelligence.
2019
Our story began in 2019, inside the prestigious European ERC project FACETS (Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies), led by Prof. Massimo Leone (Università di Torino).
It was here that our founders, Lia Morra (a computer engineer from Politecnico di Torino) and Antonio Santangelo (a semiotician from the University of Turin),
started a collaboration
that would become Sense-Maiking
2019-2024
The goal? To enable large-scale, qualitative cultural studies, a feat previously limited by manual analysis.
2025
In early 2025, the research behind the FRESCO platform received the prestigious Seal of Excellence from the European Commission.
Following this recognition, Compagnia di San Paolo funded the development of the ALFRESCO project, optimizing the platform to support not only academic research and cultural studies, but also market analysis.
ALFRESCO can describe any image by analyzing it from 4 semiotic perspectives:
FIGURATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Recognizes elements from the natural world, such as: people, faces and expressions, emotions, objects, clothing and places.
PLASTIC PERSPECTIVE
Analyzes formal and visual components, including:
colors, lights and shadows, shapes and
spatial distribution of elements.
ENUNCIATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Interprets how the image positions the viewer and characters, considering: type and framing of the shot
angles and viewpoints and gaze interactions between characters or between characters and the observer.
NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
It identifies the types of values at play in the narratives conveyed through images, making use of some of the most established semiotic models for this kind of visual analysis, including in marketing, such as Greimas’s and Floch’s models.
Partnership
The project is supported by the university’s incubator, 2i3T and by the Piedmont Region, which secured funds from PR FSE Plus 2021–2027 –
Priority I, Specific Objective a, Action 4
“Support measures for the creation of start-ups.”
We bring to the market a unique solution that transforms a decades-old methodology into a scalable, cutting-edge tool for brands and researchers.
Antonio Santangelo
FOUNDER
He specializes in semiotics as a social science, consumer semiotics, visual and audiovisual semiotics, narrative theory, and digital technologies, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. On such subjects, he has published several books, including Critique of ChatGPT (2025), Imaginaries of Tomorrow (2024), Semiotics and Artificial Intelligence (2023), Value in Language and Economics (2017), and Sociosemiotics of the Audiovisual (2012). He has also worked as a consultant in marketing, for Italian research institutes (Episteme, Matica), and for major television networks (Rai, Discovery).
Lia Morra
FOUNDER
She specializes in computer vision and neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence, an emerging paradigm that combines deep learning and knowledge representation, which she applies in particular to the interpretation of images and texts. She has authored over 70 scientific publications and 4 patents. She has more than ten years of experience in the medical industry, investigating artificial Intelligence applied to radiology and cancer screening.
Ready to
understand
the unseen?
Let us apply our methodology to your most pressing questions and turn cultural data into your next strategic advantage.