Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Genova, Italy, 2008
- M.Sc. in Physics, University of Genova, Italy, 2004
Qualifications
- Habilitation à diriger des recherches, France, 2017 (highest French academic degree enabling professorship)
- Post-graduate Certificate in Academic Practice, University of Glasgow, UK, 2014
Academic Positions
- Associate Professor, Statistics Program, KAUST, Saudi Arabia (2024–present)
- Associate Professor, EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France (2015–2024)
- Lecturer, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK (2011–2015)
- Research Associate, University College London, UK (2011)
- Research Associate, University of Glasgow, UK (2010)
- Research Associate, University of Sheffield, UK (2008–2009)
- Visiting Research Scholar, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA (2007)
Research Grants
- Co-PI: Assessing livestock grazing impacts and carrying capacity in Saudi Arabia’s terrestrial ecosystems ($675K), 2025–2028, KAUST Competitive Research Grants
- PI: MUSE-COM²: AI-enabled Multimodal Semantic Communications and Computing (€300K), 2023–2026, ANR/EU Chist-ERA
- PI: 3IA Chair: Deep Probabilistic Modeling on Novel Hardware (~€200K), 2020–2023, ANR
- PI: ECO-ML: Rethinking Modern Machine Learning Tools for Low-Power Large-Scale Modeling (€300K), 2018–2021, ANR JCJC
- PI: AXA Chair of Computational Statistics: New Computational Approaches to Risk Modeling (€600K), 2016–2023, AXA Research Fund
- Partner: WindMill: Machine Learning for Wireless Communications (~€200K), 2018–2022, EU Horizon 2020
- Co-PI: Computational inference of biopathway dynamics and structures (£340K), 2014–2017, EPSRC (UK)
Awards
- Best Ph.D. Thesis Award, Doctoral School of Sorbonne University (awarded to former student Ba-Hien Tran), December 2023
- Special Mention, poster award, Autumn Meeting on Latent Gaussian Models, Trondheim, Norway, 2015
- International Association of Pattern Recognition best paper award for A survey of kernel and spectral methods for clustering, Pattern Recognition, 2008
Service
Area Chair / Senior Area Chair
- Senior Area Chair, AISTATS (2023–present)
- Area Chair, AISTATS (2020–present)
- Area Chair, ICML (2026–present)
- Area Chair, NeurIPS (2026–present)
- Area Chair, ICLR (2026–present)
Editorial
- Guest Editor, ECML/PKDD Machine Learning Journal track (2020)
- Associate Editor, Pattern Recognition (2013–2016)
- Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (2013–2016)
Reviewer (selected list)
- NeurIPS (2014-present), ICML (2015-present), AISTATS (2012-present), AAAI (2025)
Journal Reviewer (selected list)
- Journal of Machine Learning Research, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Bayesian Analysis, Statistics and Computing, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition