Hi, I’m Davide 👋

I am a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna, working with the Pervasive Software Lab.

My research lies at the intersection of distributed artificial intelligence, collective adaptive systems, and software engineering.

In particular, I study how large populations of distributed devices can learn, cooperate, and adapt over time while dealing with changing environments, limited resources, heterogeneous data, and privacy constraints.

Research interests

My current research revolves around:

• Federated and cooperative learning, for training models across decentralized devices without centralizing their data;
• self-organizing and collective adaptive systems, where global behaviours emerge from local interactions;
• aggregate computing and field-based coordination, as programming abstractions for large-scale distributed systems;
• reinforcement learning, for adaptive decision-making across the edge–cloud continuum;
• continual and adaptive learning, for systems operating under evolving data distributions;
• efficient machine learning, including model sparsification and quantization for resource-constrained devices.

A recurring question behind my work is:

How can we engineer distributed systems that learn collectively while remaining adaptive, privacy-aware, and efficient?

📰 Latest news

• IEEE DCOSS-IoT 2026 — Main Track: Our paper Flexible Distributed Particle Filtering for the Internet of Things via Aggregate Computing has been accepted.

• AI4AS 2026: Our paper Discovering Collaboration from Novelty: Random Network Distillation for Clustered Federated Learning has been accepted at the 4th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Computing Systems, co-located with IEEE ACSOS 2026.

• IEEE ACSOS 2026 — Main Track: Two of our papers have been accepted:

  • C2FL: Clustered Continual Federated Learning under Spatial and Temporal Drift;
  • Multi-Target Tracking via Field-Based Distributed Particle Filtering.

Beyond research

I enjoy turning research ideas into working software, reproducible experiments, and open-source tools.

I am also involved in teaching activities at the University of Bologna, mainly in the areas of programming and computer science.

Get in touch

I am always happy to discuss research ideas, possible collaborations, open-source projects, or anything related to distributed and adaptive intelligent systems.

You can contact me directly at my institutional email address: davide.domini@unibo.it.