About Me

I am Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL). I lead the Machine Intelligence Lab - we are part of the Autonomous Systems Research Group. I am also Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna. More information about my bio, current and past appointments, etc can be found here.

What’s New

• November 2024 Our paper “On the Creativity of Large Language Models” has been accepted for publication in AI&Society. The camera ready version of the paper will be ready soon. In the meanwhile, you can find a preprint of the article here.

• October 2024 New preprint: “Moral Alignment for LLM Agents”. You can download the paper here.

• October 2024 Our paper “InterruptMe: Designing Intelligent Prompting Mechanisms for Pervasive Applications” has been awarded a Best Paper Runner-up Award in the 10-year Impact Awards category at ACM UbiComp 2024. You can find our UbiComp 2014 paper here.

• October 2024 Our paper “Tree Search in DAG Space with Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Causal Discovery” has been accepted of publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. The paper will be appear soon. You can find the arXiv preprint here.

• September 2024 We won the Best Paper Award for the paper “MarcoPolo: A Zero-Permission Attack for Location Type Inference from the Magnetic Field Using Mobile Devices” at CANS 2024. You can download the paper here.

• September 2024 New preprint: “Reinforcement Learning Discovers Efficient Decentralized Graph Path Search Strategies”. You can download the paper here.

• August 2024 Our paper “Graph Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization: A Survey and Unifying Perspective” has been accepted for publication in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). The paper will appear soon, in the meantime you can download the preprint here.

• August 2024 Our manifesto paper “Ecological Brain: Reframing the Study of Human Behaviour and Cognition” co-authored with the students of the first cohorts of our Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme for the Ecological Study of the Brain has been accepted for publication in Royal Society Society Open Science. The preprint of the paper is available here.

• August 2024 Our paper “Dynamics of Moral Behavior in Heterogeneous Populations of Learning Agents” has been accepted in the Proceedings of the 7th AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2024). You can find the preprint of the paper here.

• July 2024 Our paper “Training Foundation Models as Data Compression: On Information, Model Weights and Copyright Law” will be presented at the 2nd Internation Workshop on Generative AI and Law (GenLaw 2024), colocated with the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024), as spotlight presentation. You can download the paper here.

Previous news items can be found here.

Upcoming Events

I am currently involved in the following upcoming scientific events:

• 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)
• 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2025)
• 18th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2025)
• 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)
• 31st SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2025)
• 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)

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.

More specifically, current research areas of interest include:

• Machine Learning (in particular, decision-making problems in both single-agent and multi-agent scenarios);
• Generative Artificial Intelligence (foundational models/large language models and their applications);
• Computational models (in particular, learning models) of human/user/machine behaviour;
• Machine Intelligence for ubiquitous, mobile, and cyber-physical systems;
• AI and society.

More information about my research activities can be found here.

Last updated: 2 November 2024.