The doctoral programme offers a broad range of educational activities designed to support the academic development of PhD candidates. The seminar offerings are particularly rich and include contributions from prominent international scholars in the field of computer science.
The activities provided include dedicated courses delivered specifically to PhD students—mainly focusing on cross-cutting topics and soft skills—as well as advanced thematic seminars in which international experts teach short courses on emerging subjects of shared interest. Taken together, these initiatives help students explore diverse areas within computer science. PhD candidates are also given the opportunity to attend summer and winter schools, as well as major conferences in their research areas, as part of their training. Finally, it is worth noting that students consistently achieve significant research outcomes, such as the acceptance of papers at national and international scientific conferences, many of which are top-tier (rank A+/A++), and they receive both financial and logistical support to participate.
**Courses Specifically Offered for Academic Year 2024–2025**
Courses on cross-cutting topics and soft skills are offered to students across all three years:
Who: Prof. Cygdem Beyan (University of Verona)
Title: "Foundations of Multimodal Learning"
When: March 21, 2 PM–6 PM
Where: https://univr.zoom.us/j/99177373356
Description:
Multimodal Learning, a subfield of machine and deep learning, is a multidisciplinary research area focused on integrating and modelling multiple modalities such as acoustics, linguistics, and vision. This course explores the fundamental concepts of multimodal learning, including alignment, fusion, joint learning, temporal learning, and representation learning. Recent state-of-the-art techniques will be examined, with particular attention to effective computational algorithms for various applications.
Who: Prof. Daniele De Sensi
Title: "Scalability and Collective Communication in Large-Scale Deep Learning"
Description:
Training deep learning models at scale requires efficient communication strategies to handle massive datasets and model sizes. This course introduces the fundamental challenges of large-scale deep learning and explores how collective operations impact performance. We will cover key collective algorithms, analyze their costs using the alpha–beta model, and discuss optimization strategies for large-scale systems. By the end of the course, participants will have a solid understanding of how to model, analyze, and optimize communication in distributed deep learning.
Length (hours): 6–8
When:
- May 8: 14:00–16:00 (G0)
- May 9: 14:00–16:00 (G0)
- May 14: 14:00–16:00 (G0)
- May 15: 14:00–16:00 (G0)
Where: Room G0, Building G, Viale Regina Elena 295
Who: Prof. Simone Melzi and Prof. Filippo Maggioli
Title: "Functional Maps: A Functional Approach to the Alignment of Embeddings"
Length (hours): 24
When:
- May 29: 14:00–18:00 (G0)
- May 30: 9:00–13:00 (G0)
- June 5: 9:00–13:00 (G0)
- June 6: 9:00–13:00 (remote)
- June 27: 9:00–18:00 Hackathon (Colossus Lab)
Where: Room G0, Building G, Viale Regina Elena 295 and Colossus Lab, Via Salaria 113
Who: Prof. Giuseppe Perelli
Title: "Game-Theoretic Approach to Synthesis"
Length (hours): 8–10
When:
- June 16: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
- June 17: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
- June 18: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
- June 19: 10:00–12:00 (S1)
- June 20: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
Where: Room G0, Building G, Viale Regina Elena 295 and Room S1, Building E, Viale Regina Elena 295
Who: Prof. Simone Scardapane
Title: "Into the Land of Automatic Differentiation"
Length (hours): 10
When:
- July 7: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
- July 8: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
- July 9: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
- July 10: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
- July 11: 10:00–12:00 (G0)
Where: Room G0, Building G, Viale Regina Elena 295 and Room S1, Building E, Viale Regina Elena 295
Who: Prof. Maurizio Mancini
Title: "Fundamentals of Video Game Programming in Unity 3D"
Length (hours): 20
When: Mid-July 2025
Where: Computer Science Department & online
Who: Salvatore Pontarelli
Title: "Domain-Specific Hardware Architectures for Artificial Intelligence"
Length (hours): 3
When: October 7, 2025, 9–12
Where: Room S1, Building E
Who: Prof. Danilo Avola and Prof. Daniele Pannone
Title: "Beyond Sight: Using Wi-Fi Sensing Techniques to Solve Computer Vision Tasks"
Length (hours): 4
When: TBA
Where: Computer Science Department
**Specialised Educational Pathways in Computer Science**
The PhD programme in Computer Science has organised numerous seminars within highly specialised and advanced educational tracks on various hot topics, in collaboration with leading national and international scholars in the field.
The full list of delivered seminars is available in the dedicated section.
**Other Training Activities**
PhD candidates engage daily in development, reporting, and documentation tasks within both external and internal projects of the Department. Notably, some have had the opportunity to gain experience in industrial or governmental environments, thereby strengthening their skills in managing non-academic systems.
Among teaching-related activities, PhD students often have the opportunity to supervise and guide Bachelor’s and Master’s thesis students, both during project development and during the preparation of the written dissertation. This activity allows them to obtain recognition as “Co-supervisor”.