Simone Scardapane is Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications (DIET) of Sapienza University of Rome, where he completed his PhD in 2016 and subsequently held positions as a postdoctoral researcher, RTD-A, and RTD-B. His research spans machine learning and artificial intelligence, focusing on the design of efficient, adaptive, and interpretable neural architectures, which today lie at the core of modern AI systems.
His methodological contributions range from adaptive computation and the efficiency of large language models, to extending deep learning to topological and relational domains, to studying the internal properties and interpretability of neural networks. These competencies have been applied in collaboration with domain experts in areas such as telecommunications (the European project 6G-GOALS), high-energy physics (in collaboration with the ATLAS groups in Rome and Liverpool), medicine, energy, and Earth observation.
He is the author of approximately 150 publications in leading international venues, with an h-index of 31 (Scopus) and over 5,000 citations. He holds prominent editorial roles as Area Chair for NeurIPS and ICLR and Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR); in 2021 he chaired the Statistical Pattern Recognition Techniques Technical Committee of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. He is a Junior Fellow of the Sapienza School for Advanced Studies (2024–2026) and an affiliate researcher at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN).
He leads several competitive research projects, including as Principal Investigator for the Sapienza grant CENTS, local PI for the PRIN project CLASSICS, and Work/Task Package leader for the European projects 6G-GOALS and RELAY (Norwegian Research Council). He supervises a group of about 10 PhD students in the SNAIL (Structured NeurAl Intelligence Lab) lab, with collaborations involving institutions such as Translated, Pi School, Leonardo, and Fastweb.
He received the Google Faculty Award (2020) for initiatives in teaching and inclusion in machine learning, and has been invited to give seminars and keynotes at institutions including the University of Cambridge, Università della Svizzera italiana, and various industrial and research organizations. He is also active in outreach and public engagement: he co-founded and chaired the non-profit Italian Association for Machine Learning, coordinates a Sapienza initiative on AI literacy for teaching staff, and runs the industrial liaison programme of Sapienza's Master's Degree in Data Science. He is the author of the popular-science book Alice's Adventures in a Differentiable Wonderland, with approximately 4,000 copies sold and over 500,000 downloads.