Marco Ortolani

Biography

I got my PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Palermo (Italy) in 2004, with a dissertation was on the application of fuzzy logic and market basket analysis to the classification of genomics and proteomics data. Part of the research was conducted between 2001 and 2003 at Tripos research lab in San Francisco (USA), studying machine learning methods applied to biological data analysis.

Later, I have been assistant professor at the Computer Engineering Dept. of the University of Palermo, where I taught Computer Networking, for undergraduates, and Formal languages and compilers, at Masters level.

In 2017 I was a visiting researcher under a Fulbright grant for a period of nine months at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (USA).

In March 2019 I joined Keele as a lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Mathematics where I currently work in the area of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Research and scholarship

My expertise is in machine learning applied to data from IoT and cyber-physical systems. My current research interest is in interpretable machine learning.

I was the PI for ‘BiggerData’, a project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (€100k) on innovative techniques for integrating open data with information extracted from social networks.
I am currently Co-I of an inter-disciplinary research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on ‘FemTech surveillance: Gendered digital harms and regulatory approaches’, led by Maria Tzanou (Law) at University of Sheffileld.
I am part of the steering committee of the Digital Society Institute and I am the academic liaison for the Turing University Network at Keele University.

I have co-authored more that 60 scientific publications in leading international journals and conferences (Google scholar)

Teaching

Currently teaching:
- CSC-20004 Advanced Programming Practices for UG in Computer Science
- CSC-40064 Fundamentals of Computers and Networks for Masters students in Computer Science and Cyber Security

Research themes

I am the lead for the eXplainable and Responsible AI (XRAI) lab at the School of Computer Science and Mathematics.

My research area falls within the themes of:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Human-centred Computing