Battista Biggio

Battista Biggio (MSc 2006, PhD 2010) is a Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Cagliari, Italy, and research co-director of AI Security at the sAIfer lab (www.saiferlab.ai). He has been attacking machine-learning (ML) models well before adversarial examples were discovered, in the context of cybersecurity applications such as spam filtering, malware detection, web security, and biometric recognition (PRJ 2018). His team was the first to formalize attacks on ML models as optimization problems and to demonstrate gradient-based evasion (ECML-PKDD 2013) and poisoning (ICML 2012) attacks on ML algorithms, playing a leading role in the establishment and advancement of this research field. His seminal paper on “Poisoning Attacks against Support Vector Machines” won the 2022 ICML Test of Time Award. His work on “Wild Patterns” won the 2021 Best Paper Award and Pattern Recognition Medal from Elsevier Pattern Recognition. Prof. Biggio has managed several industrial, national, and EU-funded projects, and regularly serves as Area Chair for top-tier conferences in machine learning and computer security, such as NeurIPS and the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition and chaired IAPR TC1 (2016-2020). He is a Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, and AAIS, a Senior Member of ACM, and a member of IAPR and ELLIS.