Programma Visiting Professor

Francesca is an Assistant Professor in Statistics at Sapienza University of Rome (Italy) and Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate to the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment in the same institution. Francesca mostly works on Bayesian nonparametric models for complex networks, humanitarian applications and disclosure risk assessment. She is also exploring fair machine learning models and algorithms. She obtained her PhD in 2022 at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Caron and Prof. Rousseau. During her PhD years, she interned at the Dalle Molle Institute for AI (Lugano, Switzerland) and at J.P. Morgan (London). From 2022 to 2024 she was Assistant Professor in Data Science at the London School of Economics.

Marco Gaboardi is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Boston University. Before joining Boston University, he has been on the faculty at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and at the University of Dundee, UK. Marco received his PhD from the University of Torino, Italy, and the Institute National Polytechnique de Lorraine, France. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, at Harvard University’s CRCS center, and at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley. He is a recipient of an EU Marie Curie Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, a Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies and a Google Research Award. Marco's research is in programming languages, formal verification, and in differential privacy.

Robert Feldt is professor of Software Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and Blekinge Institute of Technology, both in Sweden. He is passionate about a range of topics from human factors and automation to statistics, causal analysis, and applied machine learning (ML). His primary focus is on software testing and quality, along with human-centered software engineering. Lately, he's also been working on using ML in medicine/healthcare and materials science.
He often works alongside companies in Sweden, Europe, and Asia, while also leading more basic research. In 2002, he earned a PhD in Computer Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology. He also studied Psychology at Gothenburg University in the 1990s. Beyond academia, he brings over 30 years of experience as an IT, software, and ML consultant. Dr. Feldt contributes as the co-Editor in Chief of the Empirical Software Engineering journal and serves on the editorial boards of two other journals, STVR and SQJ

Mira Mezini is a Professor of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt (TUDa), leading the Software Technology Lab. After completing her PhD at the University of Siegen in Germany, Mezini was an assistant professor at Northeastern University (USA) before joining TUDa in 2000. She serves on the board of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE and co-directs hessian.AI, the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence. Mezini’s research focuses on three main areas: programming systems for reliable distributed software and AI, automated software analysis, and foundational code models.

Alexander Repenning is the Hasler Professor and Chair of Computer Science Education at the PH FHNW (School of Teacher Education at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland), is a computer science professor at the University of Colorado. He is directing the international Scalable Game Design Initiative. Repenning is a pioneer of blocks-based programming (a.k.a. drag and drop programming). He has worked in research and development at Asea Brown Boveri, Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, and Hewlett Packard. Repenning is the creator of the AgentSheets and AgentCubes simulation and game computational thinking tools. He has offered game design workshops in the USA, Mexico, South America, Europe and Japan. His work has received numerous awards including the Gold Medal from the mayor of Paris for “most innovative application in education of the World Wide Web”, as well as “best of the best innovators” by ACM and has been featured in WIRED Magazine. Repenning has been a Telluride Tech Festival honoree for contributions to computer science. Repenning is an advisor to the National Academy of Sciences, the European Commission, the National Science Foundation, The Japanese Ministry of Education and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Massimiliano Di Penta is a full professor at the University of Sannio, Italy. His research interests include software evolution, software analytics, recommender systems for software engineering, DevOps, and software engineering with/for AI. He is author of over 260 papers that appeared in international journals, conferences, and workshops. He has received several awards for research and service, including four ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper awards. Most importantly, he has received several distinguished reviewer awards. He serves and has served in the organizing and program committees of more than 100 conferences, including ICSE, FSE, ASE, and ICSME. He has been program co-chair of ICSE 2023, ESEC/FSE 2021, ASE 2017, and several other conferences. He is associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Software: Evolution and Processes edited by Wiley. He is an editorial board member of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal edited by Springer. He has served on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Chee Yap is Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He has published over 195 papers in computational geometry, computer algebra, robotics, visualization and complexity theory. His book "Fundamental Problems of Algorithmic Algebra" (Oxford Press 2000) is widely cited in algebraic computation. He was the Director of Studies Prize winner (1971) in Boys Wing , Royal Military College (Malaysia), and received a double BS degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from MIT (1972-75), a PhD in Computer Science from Yale (1975-80) under Richard Lipton. He has served on editorial boards of SIAM J. of Computing, J. of Symbolic Computation, Algorithmica, J. of Computer and System Sci., lnt'l J. of Computational Geometry and Applic., Computational Geometry: Theory and Applic., and Mathematics in Computer Sci. Recently, he served as conference chairs of ISSAC 2017 and ICMS 2014. He was a KIAS Scholar at Korea Institute of Advanced Study (2006-09), and member of Academia Europaea (2019).

Mirco Musolesi is Full Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science at University College London.

He leads the Machine Intelligence Lab, which is part of the Autonomous Systems Research Group. He also holds a position as Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna. He joined UCL in June 2015 as Reader in Data Science and he was promoted to Full Professor in October 2019. He was a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence from September 2016 to September 2022. Before joining UCL, he was a Reader in Data Science and Networked Systems (Senior Lecturer until February 2014) at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. From November 2009 to August 2011 he was a Lecturer in Computer Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. Before that, he worked as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, where he was a Fellow of the Institute for Security, Technology and Society, and at the Computer Laboratory (now Department of Computer Science and Technology) at the University of Cambridge.

Nigel Davies is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of DSI@Lancaster. He has held visiting positions at Sony Electronics, Google Research, ETH Zurich and CMU. His work is in the area of pervasive computing including systems support for new forms of data capture and interaction and is characterised by an experimental approach involving large-scale deployments of novel systems with end-users. He has chaired many of the major conferences in the field and is a former editor of IEEE Pervasive Computing and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He has been PI or CI on over £9.8 million worth of grants.