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General Information

Full Name Simone Balloccu
Date of Birth 11 August 1993
Languages Italian (native);
English (IELTS C1);
Domain Computer science; NLP; AI;
Bio Computer scientist with 6+ years of experience in NLP & AI research, and author of 17 peer-reviewed NLP publications. I was involved in several EU-funded projects, including Horizon 2020, ERC and EU Erasmus Traineeship. I implemented and evaluated several AI resources for behaviour change, including conversational agents and datasets for nutrition counselling and motivational interviewing.

Work

Education

Research experience

Organisational experience

Skills

  • Programming
    • Fluent in: C; Java; Python;
    • Familiar with: R; Scala; Julia; OCaml;
  • Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
    • Classical machine learning algorithms, including classification and regression approaches.
    • Supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning.
    • Model training, fine tuning and fairness assessment (including MS Fairlearn and AI Fairness 360).
  • Natural Language Generation (NLG)
    • Approaches to symbolic NLG through syntactic realisers and templating engines. Development tools including Arria Studio NLG and SimpleNLG.
    • Approaches to E2E generation, including Seq2Seq, Transformers and Large Language Models in general.
    • Experience in model prompting, including style transfer, prompt injection and prompt-engineering in general.
    • Intent-based conversational AI; development tools including Juji, DialogFlow and RASA.
  • Misc.
    • Extensive experience in human evaluations of NLP systems, including both intrinsic and extrinsic, with and without experts.
    • Experience with crowdsourcing platforms, including Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific.
    • Algorithm optimisation and parallelization.
    • Genetic algorithms.
    • Databases development, including MySQL and NoSQL.
    • Embedded computing and IoT.
    • Fundamentals of Robotic programming.
    • Fundamentals of Project Management.
    • Networking fundamentals (CISCO CCNA 1-2).