Bio

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.

You can find more information about my current and past appointments, research profile, etc. here.

What’s New

October 2021 Our paper Goal-directed graph construction using reinforcement learning has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

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

September 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”.

September 2021 New arXiv preprint: “Reinforcement Learning on Encrypted Data”.

September 2021 I got interviewed for a Q&A article on causality in digital medicine in Nature Communications.

Past news can be found here.

Opportunities

• I am very happy to discuss potential Ph.D. opportunities in my lab. Please feel free to contact me by email, including a brief description of your research interests and your CV in your message.

• I also have funding for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow position. Please contact me if you are interested.

Upcoming Events

I am currently involved in the following upcoming scientific events:

• 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2022) [Program Committee Member]
• 10th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022) [Program Committee Member]
• 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022) [Senior Program Committee Member]
• 27th ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (ACM IUI 2022) [Program Committee Member]
• 35th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021) [Program Committee Member]
• 2nd ACM Workshop on Distributed Machine Learning at ACM CoNEXT 2021 [Program Committee Member]

Please consider submitting your work to and attending these conferences and workshops.

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

Research Interests

I have broad research interests spanning several traditional areas of Computer Science and beyond. In the recent years, my lab has been focusing on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence and their applications to a variety of practical and theoretical problems and domains, in particular networked systems, human-centered AI, and security&privacy. More specifically, current research topics include:

• Machine Learning/Reinforcement Learning and networked systems;
• Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning and its applications;
• Modelling and analysis of social systems (human, artificial and hybrid);
• Computational models (in particular, learning models) of human/user behaviour and their applications to the design of algorithms and systems, e.g., for human-centered AI, security&privacy and digital health;
• Machine intelligence for ubiquitous computing, cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things.

Publications

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

Last updated: 9 November 2021.