Associate Professor
University of Trento
Trento, Italy
My main research areas are machine learning and optimization, explainable AI, and distributed systems. URL: https://sites.google.com/site/giovanniiacca/
I am an Associate Professor of Information Engineering at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Trento, Italy, where I founded the Distributed Intelligence and Optimization Lab (DIOL). Previously, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Germany (RWTH Aachen, 2017-2018), Switzerland (University of Lausanne and EPFL, 2013-2016), and the Netherlands (INCAS3, 2012-2016), as well as in industry in the areas of software engineering and industrial automation. I am co-PI of the PATHFINDER-CHALLENGE project "SUSTAIN" (2022-2026). Previously, I was co-PI of the FET-Open project "PHOENIX" (2015-2019). I have received three best paper awards (D’IoT IEEE VTC-Spring 2025, EvoApps 2017, and UKCI 2012). My research focuses on computational intelligence, distributed systems, and explainable AI applied, e.g., to medicine. In these fields, I co-authored more than 210 peer-reviewed publications. I am actively involved in organizing tracks and workshops at some of the top conferences on computational intelligence, and I regularly serve as a reviewer for several journals and conference committees. I am the General Chair of PPSN 2026. I am an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Applied Soft Computing, Memetic Computing, Evolutionary Intelligence, Applied Intelligence, and Frontiers in Robotics and AI.
Call topics of interest
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Project cooperation
Expertise in Evolutionary Learning and Optimization
I'm interested in Evolutionary Learning & Optimization, and hybrid systems combining, e.g., RL with Evolutionary Algorithms.