Luca Scimeca

AI Research Scientist & Founder

Work

Employment, education, academic service and awards.

Current

2026 —

Something New

Stealth Startup

Building. More soon.

Employment history

2025–26

AI Research Scientist

Sapient Intelligence·Boston, USA

Generative AI and probabilistic inference for reasoning, language and vision. Contributed to the release of HRM-Text and Unigen, state-of-the-art models at their size for language and vision.

2023–25

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Mila — Quebec AI Institute·Montreal, Canada

Postdoc in Yoshua Bengio's group. Generative AI, probabilistic inference, and AI applications to computer vision, drug discovery and robotics.

Research and Teaching Assistant — IFT6390B — Foundation of Machine Learning (graduate course).

2021–23

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Harvard University·Boston, USA

AI for healthcare and genomics. Deep generative models for bio-sequence design, working with Dr Ming-Ru Wu on tumour biology and immunotherapy.

2021–23

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute·Boston, USA

AI for healthcare and genomics, jointly with Harvard University.

2021

AI Research Scientist

Naver Corp·Seoul, South Korea

Visiting researcher. Learning representations, bias, robustness and generalisation in deep learning.

2020–21

Postdoctoral Research Associate

University of Cambridge·Cambridge, UK

AI and robotics.

2020–21

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge·Cambridge, UK

College fellowship in AI and robotics.

2017–20

PhD Candidate in AI and Robotics

Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory, University of Cambridge·Cambridge, UK

Machine learning for sensory perception and action in robotic systems, supervised by Prof. Fumiya Iida.

Research and Teaching Assistant — 3F8 Inference · Engineering Tripos Part IIA · Robotics, Part IA.

2020

Freelance Writer in Artificial Intelligence

Academic Minds·London, UK

2018–19

AI / ML Consultant

Critical Future·London, UK

2016

Junior Software Engineer

Extraordinary Managed Services Ltd·Edinburgh, UK

Education

2017–20

PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

University of Cambridge·Cambridge, UK

Thesis: Soft Morphological Computation, Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory.

2019

Brains, Minds and Machines Summer School

Massachusetts Institute of Technology·Boston, USA

AI and computational neuroscience.

2013–17

BEng (Hons) in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering

University of Edinburgh·Edinburgh, UK

First Class with Honours. Department Prize and Howe Prize for the highest cumulative GPA of the graduating class.

Academic service — ongoing

2019 —
  • Review Editor, Bio-Inspired Robotics, Frontiers in Robotics and AI.
  • Grant Reviewer, European Research Council (ERC).
  • Program Committee, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
2017 —
  • Reviewer for NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR and AAAI.
  • Reviewer for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL), ICRA, IROS, RoboSoft and IEEE RAS/EMBS.

Academic service — past

2024
  • Program Committee, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2025.
2021
  • Workshop Co-organizer, Robot-Assisted Systems for Medical Training, ICRA 2021, Xi'an, China.
  • Workshop Co-chair, Biohybrid, Cyborg, Human in the Loop, International Workshop on Embodied Intelligence (EI 2021), Cambridge, UK.
2020
  • Workshop Co-organizer, Robot-Assisted Training for Primary Care, IROS 2020, Las Vegas, USA.
  • Workshop Organizer, Human-Robot Medical Interaction, 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Cambridge, UK.
2018
  • Workshop Co-organizer, Agri-Food Robotics, Cambridge, UK.

Awards & honours

2025

EB-1A “Einstein Visa”

United States Government

In recognition of extraordinary ability in AI/ML research.

2023

Language Sciences Incubator Fund

University of Cambridge·UK

2020

GMSI Award

University of Tokyo·Japan

2018

AJS Special Award — Industrial Manipulation Challenge

World Robotics Summit 2018·Tokyo, Japan

2018

1st Place — Robot Rescue Simulation League

RoboCup 2018·Montreal, Canada

2018

1st Place — Manipulation Challenge

IEEE RoboSoft 2018·Livorno, Italy

2017

Howe Undergraduate Prize

University of Edinburgh·UK

Best performance in Artificial Intelligence of the graduating class.

2017

BEng AI & SE Class Prize

University of Edinburgh·UK

Highest cumulative grade of the graduating class.

2015

Edinburgh Award

University of Edinburgh·UK

2009–13

Borsa di Studio Benivegna

Scholarship, awarded three times.