Ciao! | Andrea Cossu

I am an assistant professor (aka RTD-A in Italy) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa.

My research focuses on Continual Learning and Deep Learning. I am interested in all kinds of learning environments where data changes over time. I I have started working on Continual Learning by studying the behavior of Recurrent Neural Networks models in sequential data processing applications.

I am a member of the Pervasive AI Lab (University of Pisa and CNR) and of the Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning (CIML) group at (University of Pisa). I was a Board Member and Treasurer of ContinualAI, a non-profit research organization and an open community of Continual/Lifelong Learning researchers and enthusiasts. I am one of the maintainers of Avalanche, an End-to-End library for Continual Learning based on PyTorch.

I received my Ph.D. in Data Science from Scuola Normale Superiore and University of Pisa. My Ph.D. thesis titled "Towards Real-World Data Streams for Deep Continual Learning" is publicly available here. I received my Master's Degree in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence Curriculum) from the University of Pisa.

I spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Pisa. I was visiting researcher at KU Leuven (Belgium) and research intern at Google Brain, Mountain View (California).

I am partner of KlinK s.r.l., where I supervise the R&D activities.

CV

Recent news

2025-04-23/25 I am co-organizing the special session "Streaming Continual Learning: fast adaptation and knowledge consolidation in dynamic environments" at ESANN 2025 in Bruges.
2025-03-24/27 I am co-organizing the spring school "Learning over Time" together with colleagues from University of Siena. The school is held at Certosa di Pontignano.
2025-02-12/14 I presented a poster at the 11th International Conference on Guided Self-Organization (GSO-2025) in Tübingen. More ALife coming!

Older news

2024-05-27 Check out the slides of my 3-lecture series on Artificial Life in the Collective Machine Intelligence PhD course at University of Pisa.
2024-05-25 I had the opportunity to talk about the EU project EMERGE at the Robotics Festival in Pisa.
2024-03-08 I gave a virtual lecture at the University of Plymouth on Continual Learning. Slides are available in the Talks section.
2023-10-19 The 1st ContinualAI Unconference was a blast! 24 hours nonstop of great content and amazing discussion. Thanks to everyone in the community for staying with us for so long. An extra thanks to all the people who volunteered to help with the organization!
2023-09-13: My Ph.D. thesis is now publicly available, you can download it here.
2023-07-17: I received my Ph.D. in Data Science!
2023-05-01: I joined the University of Pisa as a Research Fellow, working on emergent awareness from minimal collectives within the EMERGE project (EU EIC Pathfinder program).
2023-03-20: I joined the Deep Continual Learning Seminar at Dagstuhl, Germany. A wonderful 5-days gathering of the most important Continual Learning researchers from all around the world.
2022-12-12: I will start my 3-months research internship at Google Brain in Mountain View, California!
2022-09-21: I was invited as a speaker to the DICE 2022 conference on theoretical physics! Why? To talk about Artificial Intelligence and Continual Learning, of course! The evening was open to the public and to all the people in the amazing Castiglioncello (Italy).
2022-05-31: I delivered a talk "Continual Learning: from zero to hero" at the University of Verona. The talk will include an introduction to Continual Learning and a hands-on session with Avalanche. See you there!
2022-02-01 / 2022-04-30: I joined KU Leuven as a visiting PhD student. I worked for three monts at ESAT department, in the PSI group under the supervision of Prof. Tinne Tuytelaars.
2021-11-19: The first course on Continual Learning is about to start! The course is hosted by University of Pisa and ContinualAI and Vincenzo Lomonaco will be the teacher. I will help throughout the course as teaching assistant. More than 400 students already signed up, this is huge :)