Dario Zanca, PhD

Short bio. I am a Group Head of the Applied Machine Learning Workgroup at the Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. I have been an ELLIS member since 2023. Previously, I was a postdoc at the Neurosense Lab, at the Department of Medicine, Surgery, and Neuroscience, Siena, Italy. I obtained my Ph.D. in Smart Computing from the University of Florence, under the supervision of Prof. Marco Gori, with the dissertation: "Toward Laws of Visual Attention". I was a visiting Ph.D. student at the Caltech Vision Lab, under the supervision of Prof. Pietro Perona. I obtained a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Palermo, Italy. I was a visiting M.Sc. student at the University of Szczecin, Poland, and at the Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Research activity. My research interests broadly fall into deep learning and computational cognitive sciences, focusing on human-inspired computer vision, robustness, and application. I published 40+ peer-reviewed papers, many of which were at top international journals and A* conferences. I co-organized the NeurIPS GMML 2023 Workshop, the ICIAP AGAVE 2023 Workshop, and the WACV GMCV 2025 Workshop. I am an active reviewer for major AI conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.

Teaching activity. I am responsible for the mandatory lecture on Machine Learning for Time Series (500+ students), and the elective seminar on AI & Eye-Tracking at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. I am responsible for all the research internships at my current lab. Previously, I taught Programming for Data Science (University of Siena, Italy), Databases (Fondazione Vita, Siena, Italy), and Programming for the Web (Camera di Commercio, Arezzo, Italy).

Editorial activity. I am an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics and the IET Cognitive Computation and Systems.

Awards. I was awarded by the Emergent Talent Initiative in 2023 and by the EELISA Community Engagement initiatives in 2022 and 2021. I received a special mention at the "Marco Cadoli" award for the best Italian doctoral thesis in 2020. I was awarded first prize at the "Hackathon Soccer Data Challenge" and at the "Hackathon Mediaset Infinity". 

Industry collaborations. I led, supervised, or contributed to projects in collaboration with major companies such as Siemens Healthineers, Nuremberg Zoo,  Stabilo, Schaeffler, Deutsches Museum, Expert.AI.

Reach out activities. Besides academic work, I am committed to scientific dissemination. I organized two editions of the Pint of Science (Nuremberg), I was a scientific animator at Palermo Scienza, and I was an invited speaker at several public events. I publish a podcast series on AI-related topics.