Dr Fabrizio Costa

Fabrizio received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Firenze, Italy. Before joining Exeter University as a Lecturer in Data Analytics (2017), he worked as a Research Assistant at the Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany.

Reserach interests:

At high level my main research question is: how can we integrate domain expert knowledge at the right abstraction level into machine learning (ML) systems and how can we extract knowledge from these systems at various abstraction levels.

In particular I have been interested in: 1) generalizing the type of information that ML algorithms can process and 2) extending the type of problems that ML can address.

1) The study of input generalization for ML algorithms has lead to the development of efficient and flexible graph kernels and feature generators for graphs (see the EDeN library) with applications in relational learning and chemo- and bioinformatics domains.

2) The study of generalizing ML tasks has lead to the notion of data driven design or Constructive Machine Learning (CML) (see the CML workshops). The objective of CML is the design of algorithms that can build novel objects endowed with desired properties. Such algorithms have a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from drug and protein design to automatic software generation, from music composition to video game assets construction.

Academic profiles:

Google Scholar, DBLP, Research Gate