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).