Battista Biggio’s research over the past 15 years has addressed theoretical and methodological issues in the area of machine learning and pattern recognition, in the context of real-world applications, including spam filtering, intrusion and malware detection, and biometric recognition. He has provided pioneering contributions in the area of adversarial machine learning, being the first to demonstrate gradient-based evasion and poisoning attacks on machine-learning algorithms, and how to mitigate them, playing a leading role in the establishment and advancement of this research field.

Positions held

• 2024-present: Full Professor, University of Cagliari, Italy
• 2022-2024: Associate Professor, University of Cagliari, Italy
• 2015-present: Co-founder and R&D manager of the spinoff company Pluribus One
• 2017-2022: Tenure-track Assistant Professor, University of Cagliari, Italy
• 2010-2016: Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cagliari, Italy
• 2011: Visiting Researcher, University of Tuebingen, Germany

Education

• Ph.D., Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, University of Cagliari, Italy, 2010
• M.Sc., Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Italy, 2006 (with honors)
• B.Sc., Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Italy, 2004 (with honors)

Awards and Honors

• 2022 ICML Test of Time Award for the paper: “Poisoning Attacks against Support Vector Machines” (published at ICML 2012).
• 2021 NeurIPS Outstanding Reviewer Award (top 8% reviewers)
• 2021 Best Paper Award and Pattern Recognition Medal for the paper: “Wild Patterns: Ten Years After the Rise of Adversarial Machine Learning” (published on Elsevier Pattern Recognition in 2018).
• 2018 IJCAI-ECAI Distinguished Program Committee Member.
• 2014 Premium Award for Best Paper in IET Biometrics journal: “Security Evaluation of Biometric Authentication Systems under Real Spoofing Attacks” (published on IET Biometrics in 2012).

National and International Acknowledgements

• 2020-2021: Italian National Scientific Qualification for Full Professor (ING-INF/05 and INF/01).
• 2017: Italian National Scientific Qualification for Associate Professor (ING-INF/05 and INF/01).

Top Italian Scientists. Dr. Biggio is one of the most cited Italian computer scientists.

Top Scientists Ranking for Computer Science. Dr. Biggio is in the Top Scientists Ranking for Computer Science.

Publications and Research Impact. Dr. Biggio has published more than 100 papers in scientific journals and conferences, including top-tier conferences in machine learning (ICML, NeurIPS) and computer security (USENIX Sec., NDSS, IEEE Symp. S&P). His H-index is 49 and his papers collected more than 16,900 citations (according to Google Scholar, Nov. 2024). Please refer to his Google Scholar profile page, or to his Scopus profile page for the full list of publications.

Professional Activities
Advisory Board Memberships

• 2022: Advisory council member for Bosch AI Shield, Bosch Global Software Tech., India

Leadership in Scientific Associations

• 2018-2021: Chair of the IAPR TC1 on Statistical Pattern Recognition Techniques.

Society Memberships

• 2025-present: Elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow
• 2021-present: Member of the ELLIS Society
• 2021-present: Elevated to ACM Senior Member
• 2017: Elevated to the grade of IEEE Senior Member
• 2016-present: Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• 2014-present: Member of the AI*IA, Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence
• 2013-present: Member of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society
• 2008-present: Member of the Int’l Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)
• 2007-present: Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• 2007-present: Member of the IEEE Computer Society

Organizer/Chair of Programme/Technical Committees, Conferences and Workshops (2018-2022)

• 2022: Track chair for AI, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis at ICPR, Montreal, Canada.
• 2021: co-chair Joint IAPR Int’l Workshop S+SSPR, Padua, Italy.
• 2020: Senior Program Chair, IJCAI-PRICAI, online event.
• 2020: co-chair 3rd Deep Learning Security Workshop, San Francisco, California, USA.
• 2019: co-chair 1st ICML Workshop on Synthetic Realities, Long Beach, California, USA.
• 2018: co-chair 12th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence & Security, London, UK.
• 2018: co-chair Joint IAPR Int’l Workshop S+SSPR, Beijing, China.

Editorial Boards

• 2017-now: Associate Editor of Elsevier Pattern Recognition
• 2019-2020: Associate Editor of IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine
• 2017-2019: Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
• 2017-2018: Associate Editor of Int’l Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics

Recent Selected Programme/Technical Committee Memberships in Conferences and Workshops

• 2023: USENIX Security Symposium
• 2022: 36th Conf. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
• 2022: Int’l Conf. Machine Learning (ICML)
• 2022: USENIX Security Symposium
• 2022: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
• 2022: 43rd IEEE Symp. Security & Privacy (SP)
• 2021: IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
• 2021: 35th Conf. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
• 2021: USENIX Security Symposium
• 2021: Int’l Conf. Machine Learning (ICML)
• 2021: Int’l Conf. Learning Representations (ICLR)
• 2021: 42nd IEEE Symp. Security & Privacy (SP)
• 2020: 41st IEEE Symp. Security & Privacy (SP)
• 2020: 34th Conf. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

Press

• Oct. 17, 2022. The Horizon EU project ELSA: European Lighthouse on Secure and Safe AI (in Italian).
• Jul. 26, 2022 . 2022 ICML Test of Time Award (in Italian).
• May 25, 2021 . Interview on Communications of ACM: Deceiving AI.
• Jul. 27, 2020 . Short comment on Wired about AI/ML security testing in big companies and its automation in software development pipelines.
• May 11, 2020 . Short comment on Wired about adversarial T-shirts against YOLO and R-CNN object detectors.
• Nov. 10, 2019 . Short comment on NYT about Professor Dawn Song’s work on adversarial stop signs.
• Oct. 26, 2019 . Invited speaker at the Avast AI Cybersec conference (in Italian).
• Aug. 30, 2019 . Article on ZeroUnoWeb (in Italian) on AI security.
• Apr. 24, 2019 . Interview on New Scientist about adversarial examples and AI.
• Mar. 4, 2019 . Interview on El Pais about deepfake videos (in Spanish).
• Feb. 21, 2019 . The Register features our recent article on transferability of adversarial attacks against machine learning here.
• Jan. 03, 2019 . Interview on Bloomberg about AI & hackers.
• Dec. 5, 2018 . Invited speaker at the IBM/MIT Innovation Leaders Summit (in Italian).
• Nov. 8, 2018 . Distinguished program committee member of IJCAI/ECAI 2018 (in Italian).
• May 20, 2018 . Invitation to the Huawei STW workshop (in Italian).
• Apr. 29, 2018 . Interview on WIRED “AI can help cybersecurity - if it can fight through the hype” .
• Mar. 9, 2018 . Interview on WIRED “ AI has a hallucination problem that’s proving tough to fix” .

Last updated: Nov. 2024