News

PostDoc opening on Data Protection in Pervasive Digital Health.

What:
The EveryWare Lab at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan in Italy is opening a PostDoc position in the area of Data Protection in Pervasive Digital Health. The PostDoc activity will be part of a project financed by the Next Generation EU package and focused on exploiting pervasive computing and AI for innovation in telemedicine applications. The research plan includes the investigation of distributed privacy-preserving data sharing solutions, focused on digital health related data acquired by sensors in personal and medical devices. The work will be supervised by Prof. Claudio Bettini.

Where:
The Department of Computer Science is located in the Scientific Campus (Città Studi) within the vibrant city of Milan.  The EveryWare lab offers an enthusiastic and stimulating research environment at the forefront of research in pervasive computing and data privacy with strong collaborations with industry and other academic institutions worldwide.

When:
The position is awarded for one year starting February 2024 with the possibility of renewal up to the end of 2025. The salary is competitive (with more details provided to interested candidates).

Skills (required):
- Proficiency in written and spoken English
- PhD in CS or related area or similar research experience
- Solid CS background and programming abilities (Python, Java, mobile apps)
- Advanced knowledge of computer security fundamentals and of the main data protection techniques;
- Experience in data management in mobile and/or pervasive computing;
Skills (desired):
- Experience with DLTs.

How:
Interested candidates are welcome to send an expression of interest with a CV to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by December 1, 2023. Informal calls will be organised before formal application. 

From Self-supervised learning to LLMs for Timeseries: Adopting "GPT" paradigm for modelling behaviours at scale

 

Download the slides here!
 
Friday September 22 - 2p.m. 
Main meeting room (Sala Consiglio), 8th floor, Department of Computer Science
Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Celoria 18, Milan
 
Speaker: Prof. Flora Salim, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia.
 
Abstract
The initial release of ChatGPT that has seen a worldwide uptake of over than 100 million in just two months after its launch in November 2022. There were several key milestones leading to the development of these foundation models, which underpin the ChatGPT technology, including the introduction of Transformers architecture and the self-supervised learning paradigm. How has the underpinning technologies been applied in the pervasive computing domain, such as for human behaviour modelling? Access to annotated human behaviour data has been expensive and often infeasible. How can the GPT paradigm be adopted for modelling behaviours at scale, utilising the proliferation of sensors and IoT data in our world? This demands new ways for modelling behaviours at scale, moving away from fully-supervised learning approaches, and from narrow tasks. The heterogeneity of both the data sources and the downstream tasks, as well as lack of annotations, makes self-supervised learning to be a compelling choice, as they require no labelled data and can be made compact and generalisable. I will present our self-supervised learning (SSL) pretraining approaches for multimodal sensor data. Further, I will explain why Transformer architecture, designed for sequence-to-sequence modelling, with multi-head attention mechanism, is a perfect fit for time-series data. I will also present a new versatile paradigm, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for time-series modelling, such as for traffic forecasting and energy demand forecasting, using natural language prompts.
 
Bio
Professor Flora Salim is the inaugural Cisco Chair of Digital Transport and AI, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia, and the Deputy Director (Engagement) of the UNSW AI Institute. Her research is on ubiquitous computing, behaviour modelling, trustworthy and robust AI, and machine learning for multimodal sensor data. She is a Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society (ADM+S), and the Co-Lead of the ADM+S Machines Program, and the Transport and Mobilities Focus area. She serves as a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts, an Editor of Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), the Associate Editor-in-Chief (AEIC) of IEEE Pervasive Computing, and an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems.

The EveryWare Lab at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan in Italy is opening two PostDoc positions in the area of Pervasive Computing. 
The lab offers an enthusiastic and stimulating research environment at the forefront of research in this area, regularly publishing on top journals and conferences.
The PostDocs will work on two different topics within a new large project financed by the Next Generation EU package and focused on exploiting pervasive computing and AI for innovation in telemedicine applications.
 
Position A: Human activity recognition with applications to digital health. 
 
Position B: Classification of ultrasound images from mobile probes in real-world telemedicine systems. 
 
The positions are awarded for two years starting May 1st 2023 with possibility of extension. The salary is  competitive (with more details provided to interested candidates). 
 
Candidates requirements:
- Excellent written and spoken English
- PhD in CS or related area
- Solid CS background and programming abilities (Python, Java, mobile apps)
- Problem solving skills
- Ability to independently write papers and research proposals
- Advanced knowledge of the main data-driven paradigms for data analysis (Machine
learning, statistical analysis, data mining, decision support systems)
(for position A) - Advanced knowledge of the main sensor data processing techniques considering
mobile/wearable/IoT devices
(for position B) - Experience in developing complex software systems with mobile components.
 
Interested candidates are welcome to send a detailed CV in English including a detailed track of their work, teaching, and research experience as well as a motivation letter to 
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (for position A)
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (for position B)
Up to two additional reference letters by recognised experts will be favourably considered.
 
Deadline for sending the CV: February 15, 2023

 

Two papers have been accepted at the 20th IEEE PerCom conference which will take place in Pisa from 21st to 25th of March:

  • The paper "FedCLAR: Federated Clustering for Personalized Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognitionby Riccardo Presotto, Gabriele Civitarese, and Claudio Bettini has been accepted as a full paper at IEEE PerCom main conference. 
  • The paper "Preliminary Results on Sensitive Data Leakage in Federated Human Activity Recognition" by Riccardo Presotto, Gabriele Civitarese, and Claudio Bettini has been accepted at CoMoRea workshop, a satellite event co-located with the PerCom conference.
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