Mennan Selimi
About Me
I am a Full Professor at South East European University and Senior Research Advisor at the Max van der Stoel Institute, where I lead the Distributed Systems and Data Science Research Group (DSG). I am also Co-Founder and CTO of Sormena, a Zurich-based AI startup building ethical, human-centric AI solutions.
My research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and distributed systems, with a focus on edge intelligence, federated learning and decentralized IoT architectures. I am particularly interested in applying AI to real-world challenges — from environmental monitoring and air quality prediction to AI-driven breast cancer detection. I have published 40+ peer-reviewed papers in venues such as IEEE/ACM CCGrid, IEEE GLOBECOM, ACM MobiSys and ACM Middleware, and have been involved in more than 10 EU-funded projects (Horizon Europe, H2020, FP7). Currently, I lead Work Package 2 (Joint E-Campus) in the ChallengeEU European University Alliance, coordinating the digital infrastructure across nine EU partner institutions.
Previously, I held a postdoctoral position at the University of Cambridge (System Research Group – N4D Lab) and completed my PhD with Distinction and Honors as an EMJD fellow jointly at UPC BarcelonaTech (DSG Group) and the University of Lisbon (Técnico Lisboa/INESC-ID). I hold an Erasmus Mundus Master’s degree from Sapienza University of Rome and gained additional research experience at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS).
Education
Post-Doc, UPC BarcelonaTech (2019),
UPC Fellowship
Post-Doc, University of Cambridge (2018),
University of Cambridge Fellowship
PhD, UPC BarcelonaTech, (2017),
IST – Universidade de Lisboa, (2017),
Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Fellowship
MSc, Sapienza University of Rome (2011),
Erasmus Mundus Master Fellowship
BSc, South East European University (2009),
SEEU Fellowship
News
- Apr 2026: I will attend the Zurich AI Conference 2026 at the end of May.
- Apr 2026: Samir Shabani, from the DSG Group, will participate in the Datathon competition at ETH Zurich from 17 to 19 April. Congratulations to the team!
- Apr 2026: Hamit Kamberi from the DSG group successfully defended his master’s thesis “Intelligent Email Routing with LLMs” ! Congratulations to Hamit on this nice achievement.
- Apr 2026: I will serve on the Program Committee of the IEEE CloudCom 2026, which will take place in Paris, France (27-29 October).
- Apr 2026: I will attend the 1st Annual ChallengeEU Conference, marking one year of ChallengeEU taking place in Olsztyn, Poland on May 6–7 2026.
- Mar 2026: Our poster titled “KOMKI: Intelligent Email Routing with LLMs” has been accepted for presentation at the AI Days conference in Switzerland !
- Mar 2026: Our paper, “Towards Federated Breast Microcalcification Analysis,” has been accepted at BIOSTEC 2026, to be held in Marbella, Spain (2–4 March). Congrats Shqipe !
- Feb 2026: I will be attending the AI Days 2026 conference, organized by the Swiss AI Center, in Martigny and Fribourg on March 23–25.
- Feb 2026: This semester, I am once again teaching the Internet of Things (IoT) course, highly relevant subject that offers exciting learning opportunities for students.
- Feb 2026: I am looking for an intern to work on Agentic AI for breast cancer detection. If you’re interested, feel free to get in touch.
- Jan 2026: A new blog post on Swiss universities and their academic culture is now available. Link.
- Dec 2025: I will spend the second half of January 2026 (13-21st) in Zurich (ETH and UZH) working on the Generative AI project.
- Dec 2025: Our paper “Federated Breast Lesion Segmentation in Kaapana: A Synthetic Multi-Site Evaluation” was accepted at the BAI’26 conference to be held in Tunisia ! Congrats Shqipe!
- Dec 2025: Consider applying for our fully funded, highly professional BIP on “Industrial Robotics in Practice” at HSO.
- Nov 2025: I am happy to welcome our new intern at DSG – Tringa Saliu ! Tringa will work on an important project focused on AI-based breast cancer detection.
- Oct 2025: I will attend the Swiss AI Summit in Zurich beginning of November 2025.
- Sep 2025: On October 25th, I will speak at Software Freedom Kosova (SFK), on the topic “Mesh, Chain, and Brain: Open Networks, Blockchain Economies, and Edge AI !
- Sep 2025: As part of the ChallengeEU project, I will be in Brussels on 27–28 October to attend the WP Leads & Co Leads meeting.
- Sep 2025: I will serve on the Program Committee for MiddleWedge 2025 workshop co-located with ACM Middleware 2025 in Nashville, USA. Consider submitting a paper !
- Sep 2025: I’ll be visiting EPFL in Lausanne and University of Bern on the 18th and the University of St. Gallen on the 19th of Sep in Switzerland to explore future research collaborations.
- July 2025: I will be at the Smart City Zürich Futures Festival on 28th of August. Happy to connect and talk with anyone interested in AI!
- July 2025: I’m organizing the ChallengeEU WP2 meeting, which will take place in Offenburg on September 16–17, 2025.
- July 2025: I will serve on the Program Committee of the renowned IFIP WONS 2026 Conference, to be held in Valais, Switzerland!
- July 2025: Alba Adili, our DSG intern, has been accepted into the Master’s in Computer Science at the University of Bern ! Congrats Alba !
- June 2025: I am the co-founder of Sormena GmbH, a Zürich-based AI startup working on generative AI.