University of Technology Nuremberg

Nuremberg, Germany

gloria.desideri@utn.de

I am a doctoral student in the ELLIS Doctoral Program, based at the University of Technology Nuremberg, where I work on continual reinforcement learning under the supervision of Claire Vernade and Marlos C. Machado.

My research centers on building agents that keep learning over their lifetime — adapting to new tasks and environments without forgetting what they already know. More broadly, I am interested in reinforcement learning, online learning, and their applications to real-world decision-making problems.

I hold a Master of Science in Computer Engineering (Artificial Intelligence) from Politecnico di Milano, where my thesis explored a reinforcement learning approach for health-behavioural recommendations to reduce cancer risk. Before starting my PhD, I worked as a machine learning intern at ML Cube, was a summer researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China, and spent two years as a backend software engineer.

talks

Online and Reinforcement Learning for Marketing and Advertising — Polimi Data Scientists x ADCube, 2025. With Alessandro Nuara.

news

Nov 15, 2025	Our paper A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Health-Behavioural Recommendations to Reduce Cancer Risk was accepted at the ARLET and WiML workshops at NeurIPS 2025.
Sep 01, 2025	I started my PhD in the ELLIS Doctoral Program at the University of Technology Nuremberg, working on continual reinforcement learning.
Mar 04, 2025	Our paper “Can you be my mum?” Manipulating Social Robots in the Large Language Models Era was presented at HRI 2025.

selected publications

NeurIPS-W

A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Health-Behavioural Recommendations to Reduce Cancer Risk

Gloria Desideri, Andrés Pasinetti, Alberto Maria Metelli, and 1 more author

In ARLET Workshop and Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Workshop at NeurIPS, 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{desideri2025cancer,
  title = {A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Health-Behavioural Recommendations to Reduce Cancer Risk},
  author = {Desideri, Gloria and Pasinetti, Andr{\'e}s and Metelli, Alberto Maria and Trov{\`o}, Francesco},
  booktitle = {ARLET Workshop and Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Workshop at NeurIPS},
  year = {2025},
}