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Selected Roles


2021
current

Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
Harvard University,
Boston, United States


2021
current

Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
Dana Farber,
Boston, United States


2021

Artificial Intelligence Researcher,
Naver Labs,
Seoul, South Korea


2020
2021

Postdoctoral Research Associate,
University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK

Education

2017
2020

PhD in Artificial Intelligence
and Robotics,

University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK

2013
2017

BEng in Artificial Intelligence
and Software Engineering,

University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, UK

Biography

Luca Scimeca is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and Dana Farber, with a background in Artificial Intelligence. His current research efforts focus on the use of machine learning in the context of synthetic biology, immunology, and virology. In this regard, he is working closely with Dr. Ming-Ru Wu, and the Lab for synthetic immunity,  to boost computational biomedical research, and to use machine learning to answer basic questions in tumor biology and immunotherapy, with the ultimate goal of improving cancer treatment quality and efficiency.

In 2021 Luca joined Never Corp. as a visiting AI Research Scientist to research in the area of learning representations, domain understanding, robustness, and generalization for Deep Neural Networks (NeurIPS 2021, ICLR 2022).

During his Ph.D. and Postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge's Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory (BIRL), Luca has worked on the application of advanced machine learning models for the purpose of sensory perception and action in robotics systems. From 2019, his research has led to applying these technologies to robotics clinical settings, where, with the help of clinicians, they investigated the possibility of robotic systems to perform physical examinations. This was reflected in two major European EPSRC grants, MOTION and ROBOTPATIENT, for a combined worth of over $1,500,000. As both a Ph.D. and Postdoctoral researcher, under the supervision of Dr. Fumiya Iida, Luca has led several of the major investigations related to both grants, which, in the course of three years, have led to the publication of over 15 peer-reviewed articles on high impact journals or international conference proceedings.

Luca received his First Class Bachelor of Engineering in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering in 2017 from the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated summa cum laude, obtaining the Class award and Howe Prize for the best performance in Artificial Intelligence. During his studies, Luca has won over 13 awards, 9 of which paid scholarships for academic performance.

Research

"I am interested in the intersection between AI fundamentals and core domain applications, such as Robotics and Healthcare.  With a background in Machine Learning, Vision and Robotics, I am currently carrying out research on the use of deep learning and probabilistic machine learning to boost both the efficacy and applicability of cancer treatments, with particular focus on cancer immunotherapy and synthetic biology."

 

For a list of publications visit this link.

Highlights

Robotics Palpation

Robotics Palpation (University of Cambridge, 2019) This paper proposes a framework to investigate …

Bayesian Exploration for Morphology-Action Co-optimization (University of Cambridge, 2019) Morphology been shown to …

Dynamic Robot Control for Expressive Piano Playing (University of Cambridge, 2019) Piano is …

Coding with Neural Networks (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019) The project was developed …

Multiscale Object Recognition with Inception Neural Networks (University of Cambridge, 2018) Multiscale object …

Morphological Processing of Tactile Stimuli (University of Cambridge, 2017-2018) This project was undertaken …