About Me

I am Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL). I am a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. I am the Turing University Lead for UCL, i.e., I coordinate and support the research activities involving UCL and the Turing. I am also Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna. I lead the Intelligent Social Systems Lab. We are part of the Autonomous Systems Research Group at UCL.

More information about my bio, current and past appointments, etc can be found here.

What’s New

• Our paper Control-Tutored Reinforcement Learning: Towards the Integration of Data-Driven and Model-Based Control has been accepted for publication at L4DC 2022.

• Our paper Goal-directed graph construction using reinforcement learning has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

• Our paper Solving Graph-based Public Good Games with Tree Search and Imitation Learning has been accepted for publication at NeurIPS 2021.

• We received the 2020 ACM UbiComp 10-Year Impact Award for our paper “EmotionSense: A Mobile Phones based Adaptive Platform for Experimental Social Psychology Research”.

• I got interviewed for a Q&A article on causality in digital medicine in Nature Communications.

Past news can be found here.

Research Opportunities

I am very happy to discuss potential Ph.D. opportunities in my lab. I am looking for candidates with a good degree in Computer Science, Engineering or Maths/Statistics.

Please feel free to contact me by email, including a brief description of your research interests and your CV/transcripts in your message.

Please also do not hesitate to contact me to discuss potential postdoctoral fellowships and research visits in our lab. I am also happy to discuss summer internships for Undergraduate students at UCL.

Upcoming Events

I am currently involved in the following upcoming scientific events:

• 37th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023) [Demo Chair]
• 36th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022) [Program Committee Member]
• 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2022) [Program Committee Member]
• 4th UK Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Systems Research Symposium (MobiUK 2022) [Organising Committee Member]

Please consider submitting your work to and attending these conferences.

A list of past events I have been involved in can be found here.

Research Interests

I have broad research interests spanning several traditional and emerging areas of Computer Science and beyond.

In the recent years, my lab has been focusing on foundational work in Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence and on the application of these techniques to a variety of theoretical and practical problems and domains, e.g., networked systems, ubiquitous/cyber-physical systems, human-centered AI, digital health and security&privacy.

More specifically, current research areas of interest include:

• Machine Learning/Reinforcement Learning and their applications, with a focus on networked systems and autonomous systems;
• Computational models (in particular, learning models) of human/user behaviour as a basis for the design of algorithms and systems, with a focus on human-AI interaction;
• Machine intelligence for ubiquitous and mobile systems, cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things.

Publications

You can find my papers here or on my Google Scholar page.

Last updated: 30jjj June 2022.