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Francesco Orabona

Associate Professor, Computer Science

Principal Investigator, Adaptive Machine Learning

Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division
Email icon francesco.orabona@kaust.edu.sa
Website icon Personal Website

I think I always wanted to be a researcher! Some people like to create through paint or music. Instead, I like to create through mathematics.

Program Affiliations

Biography

Professor Francesco Orabona is a leading researcher in parameter-free online optimization. He joined KAUST from Boston University's Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. Orabona earned his B.Sc. and M.S. in electrical engineering in 2003 from the University of Naples "Federico II", Italy, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2007 from the University of Genoa, Italy. 

Prior to joining KAUST, he held positions at several institutions including, Stony Brook University, Yahoo Research, the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), the University of Milan and the Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland.

He has served as an area chair for several leading conferences, including the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) and the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Since 2022, he has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

Research Interests

Professor Orabona's research combines practical and theoretical machine learning approaches. His research interests encompass online learning, optimization and statistical learning theory.

In his current research, he is researching "parameter-free" machine learning algorithms that function effectively without the use of expensive hand-tuned parameters.
Keyword tag icon
Online learning optimization machine learning Statistical learning theory

Education Profile

  • Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Milano, 2010-2011

  • Postdoctoral Researcher, IDIAP Research Institute, 2007-2009

  • Ph.D., University of Genoa, 2007

  • B.Sc. and M.Sc. ("Laurea"), University of Napoli "Federico II", 2003

Awards and Recognitions

  • NSF CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (NSF), 2021

  • Google Research Award, Google Research, 2017

  • Best Paper Award, The International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, 2015

  • Best Paper Award, The International Workshop on Attention and Performance in Computational Vision, 2005

Publications

  • A. Cutkosky, H. Mehta, F. Orabona. “Optimal Stochastic Non-smooth Non-convex Optimization through Online-to-Non-convex Conversion”. in: Proc. of the International Conference on Machine Learning. 2023

  • N. Cesa-Bianchi and F. Orabona. “Online Learning Algorithms”. In: Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 8 (2021)

  • A. Cutkosky and F. Orabona. “Momentum-Based Variance Reduction in Non-Convex SGD”. in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32. 2019

  • X. Li and F. Orabona. “On the Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Adaptive Stepsizes”. In: Proc. of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS). 2019

  • F. Orabona and D. Pál. “Coin Betting and Parameter-Free Online Learning”. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29. 2016

Research Areas

  • Computer Science
  • Machine Learning

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