De Fabritiis, Gianni
ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
Short biography
Prof. Gianni De Fabritiis is an ICREA research professor, associate professor and group leader of the Computational Science Laboratory at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), and CEO/CSO at Acellera Ltd. He holds a bachelor degree with honors in applied mathematics (1997) by the University of Bologna and a PhD by University of London (2002). He worked for the CINECA supercomputing center in Italy (1998-1999) and was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London (2003-2006). In 2006, he founded Acellera Ltd where he acts as director. By 2008 he won a tenure-track Ramon y Cajal research position and later the national I3-tenured program. In 2014 he became a research professor by winning the ICREA research tenured position. He performed research stays as visiting professor at Stanford University and at UCLA. He has published over 110 articles in high-ranking international journals with an h-index of 38, 6000 citations and 1150 citations per year in 2020.
Research interests
The group research interests are rooted in the applications of computation to science, where we regard intelligence as a form of computation itself. 1 Molecular simulations and machine learning. We use computation such as physics-based simulations and modern machine learning to provide novel, innovative methodological approaches in biomedicine. 2 Computational intelligence. We investigate machine learning methods which would bring machine intelligence closer to human-level intelligence. In this newer research line, we look at realistic 3D simulated environments to speed up training which then can be transferred to real life. Here, we train intelligence agents and robots using reinforcement learning on virtual environments, we built scalable software for reinforcement learning and low samples learning.