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About me

I am currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa.

Previously, I was a Visiting Scientist in the Data Science and Computational Vaccinology Team at GSK, where I study predictive models for Reverse Vaccinology. 

I got my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, within the Computational Intelligence & Machine Learning Group. My supervisors were Davide Bacciu and Alessio Micheli.

My research interests are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Generative Models. At the moment, I am focusing on how to learn from graph data, whether the objective is to predict something useful with them or to generate novel graphs with desired properties.

My research in Machine Learning finds application for the most part in the biomedical field: from prenatal care to drug design/discovery, to biological pathways.

Contacts

marco.podda AT unipi.it

Room 345

Dipartimento di Informatica

Largo Bruno Pontecorvo, 3

56127, Pisa (PI) - Italy

GitHub

Ph.D. Thesis

M. Podda

 Deep Learning on Graphs with Applications to the Life Sciences


Publications

M. Podda, D. Bacciu, A. Micheli, R. Bellù, G. Placidi, L. Gagliardi

 A machine learning approach to estimating preterm infants survival: development of the Preterm Infants Survival Assessment (PISA) predictor. 

Sci Rep 8, 13743 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41598-018-31920-6

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F. Errica, M. Podda, D. Bacciu, A. Micheli

A Fair Comparison of Graph Neural Networks for Graph Classification

8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2020

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M. Podda, D. Bacciu, A. Micheli

A Deep Generative Model for Fragment-Based Molecule Generation

Proceedings of the Twenty Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), Vol. 108, 2240-2250, 2020

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D. Bacciu, F. Errica, A. Micheli, M. Podda

A Gentle Introduction to Deep Learning for Graphs

Neural Networks, Volume 129, 2020, Pages 203-221. 

ISSN 0893-6080, doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2020.06.006.

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P. Bove, P. Milazzo, A. Micheli, M. Podda

Prediction of dynamical properties of biochemical pathways with Graph Neural Networks

Best paper award winner

Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - 

Volume 3: BIOINFORMATICS, ISBN 978-989-758-398-8, pages 32-43. doi:10.5220/0008964700320043 (2020)

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D. Bacciu, A. Micheli, M. Podda

Edge-based sequential graph generation with recurrent neural networks

Neurocomputing, 2020. doi:10.1016/j.neucom.2019.11.112

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D. Bacciu, A. Micheli, M. Podda

Graph generation by sequential edge prediction

ESANN 2019 Proceedings, pages 95-100, ISBN 978-287-587-065-0.

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M. Podda, D. Bacciu, A. Micheli, P. Milazzo

Biochemical Pathway Robustness Prediction with Graph Neural Networks

ESANN 2020 Proceedings, pages 121-126, ISBN 978-2-87587-074-2.

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M. Podda, P. Bove, A. Micheli, P. Milazzo

Classification of Biochemical Pathway Robustness with Neural Networks for Graphs

Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, 2021. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-72379-8_11

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M. Podda, D. Bacciu

Graphgen-redux: a Fast and Lightweight Recurrent Model for Labeled Graph Generation

International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, 2021. doi: 10.1109/IJCNN52387.2021.9533743

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M. Podda, A. Micheli

Deep Learning in Cheminformatics

Deep Learning in Biology and Medicine, 2022. doi: 10.1142/9781800610941_0006