I am a Full Professor in Machine Learning, at the Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, where I am the head of the Pervasive Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (PAILab) and a member of the Computational Intelligence & Machine Learning Group (CI&MLG).
I have a M.Sc. in Computer Science from University of Pisa (back in year 2003) and a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from IMT Lucca (in 2008), under the supervision of the late Antonina Starita and Paulo J.G. Lisboa. Prior to joining University of Pisa as an Assistan Professor in 2016, I had worked at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, at Robotech srl, at Liverpool John Moores University, and at the Cognitive Robotic Systems laboratory, Orebro Universitet.
I am teaching courses on programming, machine learning and artificial intelligence at B.Sc, M.Sc. and Ph.D. level, and I have a broad and intense activity of supervision of B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. projects on the same topics.
I have been involved in a number of national, international and industrial research projects, acting as leading reasearcher and principal investigator, and having secured research grants for >10M Euro. I have been the coordinator of the EIC-Pathfinder EMERGE (2022-2026) and H2020 TEACHING projects (2020-2023), and the PI of the H2020 TAILOR NoE (2020-2024). I am also active as reviewer for several National, EU and international funding schemes.
I also work as scientific consultant on AI methodologies for several companies, and I am currently the Director of AI Research at Aptus.AI, a startup working on Natural Language Processing for the legal and compliance domain. I am also involved into start-up activities as founder and scientific officer of ContinualIST (Spin-off company of University of Pisa) and founder of QuantaBrain.
On the side of scientific community service, I am a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems and PC member of the major AI conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, …). I am a Senior Member of the IEEE and IEEE Computational Intelligence society (CIS) and, within IEEE, I chair the Technical Committee on Neural Networks and I have been the founder of the IEEE Task Force on Learning for graphs. I am an ELLIS member, a board member and Vice President of the AIxIA (Associazione Italiana per l’Intelligenza Artificiale, Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence) and I served as President of the Alumni and Students Association of IMT Lucca from 2019 to 2023.