Davide Bacciu

I am an associate professor 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 received both the B.Sc. and M.Sc. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, in year 2003. I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, which has been awarded the 2009 E.R. Caianiello prize for the best Italian Ph.D. thesis on neural networks. My research interests cover machine learning for structured data, Bayesian learning, deep learning and its intersection with generative approaches, reservoir computing, continual learning, distributed and embedded learning systems, with over 180 published works on the topic.

Since 2005, I have been involved in a number of national, international and industrial research projects, acting as leading reasearcher and principal investigator. I am currently 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 also work as scientific consultant on AI methodologies for several companies. I am also involved into start-up activities as founder and scientific officer of ContinualIST (Spino-off company of University of Pisa) and founder of QuantaBrain.

I have held several teaching positions in machine learning and artificial intelligence courses at B.Sc and M.Sc. level.

I serve as a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and I am a regular Program Committee member of NeurIPS, ICRL, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, AISTATS, ECML-PKDD, IJCNN. I act as supervisor for B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. theses in Computer Science and AI, as external Ph.D. reviewer and as evaluator of international research projects.

I am an IEEE Senior Member, the chair of the IEEE CIS Neural Network Technical Committee, and the founder of the IEEE TF on learning for graphs. I have been serving in the board of the Italian Association for AI since 2015, from 2017 to 2021 I held the position of Secretary of the association and from 2022 I am Vice President. Since 2029, I serve as President of the Alumni and Students Association of IMT Lucca.