Caterina De Bacco

Caterina De Bacco

CyberValley Research Group Leader

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Physics for Inference and Optimization

I like to approach research by addressing application-oriented problems involving domain experts from different disciplines via developing models and algorithms derived from statistical physics principles.

From July 2018 I am an Independent Research Group Leader at Cyber Valley, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany.

I obtained a degree in Physics at University of Padova and a PhD in Statistical Physics at Universitè Paris Sud 11 in 2015, advised by Silvio Franz and Satya Majumdar with a Marie Curie ITN fellowship .
After that, I was a Program Postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute working with Cris Moore and then at the Columbia Data Science Institute working with David Blei.

Interests

  • Inference on networks
  • Routing Optimization
  • Probabilistic Modeling
  • Statistical physics

Education

  • PhD in Statistical Physics, 2015

    Universitè Paris Sud 11

  • MSc in Theoretical Physics, 2012

    Università di Padova

  • BSc in Physics, 2010

    Università di Padova

Research

I study large interacting systems following two main research directions to tackle the problem under different angles.

Inference on networks

Complex interacting systems are often represented by large datasets containing a considerable amount of information. The question is how to capture the relevant macroscopic behavior by retaining only a small amount of information.

Routing Optimization on networks

Optimizing traffic on a network is a relevant problem in situations where traffic congestion has a big impact on transmission performance. This can be formalized as a computationally-hard constrained optimization problem where interactions are non-local and a global optimization is required.

The Team

Current Members

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Anna Badalyan

Research Intern

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Nicolò Ruggeri

PhD student

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Kibidi Neocosmos

Research Intern

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Hadiseh Safdari

Postdoctoral researcher

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Martina Contisciani

PhD student

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Alessandro Lonardi

PhD student

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Daniela Leite

PhD student

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Laura Iacovissi

Research Intern

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Nicolò Zottino

PhD student

Alumni

Andrea Della Vecchia

Intern, Master Thesis, 2019

Johannes Schulz

Intern, Master thesis, 2022

Sameh Othman

Research Intern, 2021-22

Aneesh Barthakur

Research Intern, 2022-23

Emanuele Pigani

Intern, Master Thesis, 2019

Lorenzo Ferretti

Intern, Master Thesis, 2019-20

Tainá Turella Caetano dos Santos

Research Intern, 2023

Teaching

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