CV

Curriculum vitae of Gloria Desideri.

Contact Information

Name Gloria Desideri
Professional Title PhD Student in Continual Reinforcement Learning
Email gloria.desideri@utn.de

Professional Summary

Doctoral student in the ELLIS Doctoral Program working on continual reinforcement learning, with a background in AI, online learning, and software engineering.

Experience

  • 2024 - 2025

    Milan, Italy

    Machine Learning Intern
    ML Cube
    • Optimization of Multi Head Weighting machines using Reinforcement Learning.
    • Engineered features from multi-sensor time-series data for process phase classification.
    • Applied PCA, DTW, and statistical tests to identify critical sensors and patterns.
    • Built pipelines for time-series decomposition, FFT, and feature extraction in Python.
    • Contributed to the design of a Reinforcement Learning-based dynamic pricing and advertising algorithm for hotel rooms.
    • Constructed full RL pipeline for hyperparameter selection and model evaluation using Optuna and MLFlow.
  • 2024 - 2024

    Hefei, China

    Summer Researcher
    University of Science and Technology of China
    • Extracted camera locations and 3D mesh from 360 head scan videos using COLMAP and FaceVerse.
    • Implemented k radial diffusion algorithm to enhance mesh points with color information from COLMAP.
    • Successfully applied 2DGS to the enhanced mesh points using PyTorch obtaining high-quality renders.
    • Findings presented in a poster showcase.
  • 2021 - 2023

    Milan, Italy

    Software Engineer (Backend) - Part Time
    Digitiamo
    • Implemented and maintained over 50 API routes across 20+ resources.
    • Developed over 300 automated tests using Mocha, Chai and Sinon, increasing test coverage to over 90%.
    • Refactored the relational database, reducing query times from minutes to seconds.
    • Contributed to the introduction of Kafka, which completely eliminated TimeOutErrors between microservices.
    • Collaborated in building AWS infrastructure using Terraform and Kubernetes accelerating product shipment.
    • Contributed to the introduction of CI/CD pipelines, reducing the deployment process from 6 hours to just 1 hour.

Education

  • 2025 - Present

    Nuremberg, Germany

    Doctoral Student
    ELLIS Doctoral Program
    Continual Learning
    • Working on Continual Learning under Claire Vernade and Marlos C. Machado.
  • 2022 - 2025

    Milan, Italy

    Master of Science
    Politecnico di Milano
    Computer Engineering - Artificial Intelligence
    • Associations: Polimi Data Scientists (Project Team Leader & Reading Group manager), Blackswan Quants Polimi.
    • Exchange: ESIEE Paris (France), Erasmus+ program.
    • PhD level courses: Reinforcement Learning.
    • Thesis: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Health-Behavioural Recommendations to Reduce Cancer Risk. Supervised by Prof. Francesco Trovò and Prof. Alberto Maria Metelli.
  • 2019 - 2022

    Milan, Italy

    Bachelor of Science
    Politecnico di Milano
    Computer Engineering
    • Member of the student representatives for the course of computer engineering.
    • Exchange: VIA University College (Denmark), Erasmus+ program.

Publications

  • 2025
    ``Can you be my mum?'' Manipulating Social Robots in the Large Language Models Era
    HRI 2025
  • 2025
    A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Health-Behavioural Recommendations to Reduce Cancer Risk
    ARLET@NeurIPS 2025 Workshop and WiML@NeurIPS 2025 Workshop

Awards

  • 2024
    2nd place - Google Developer Student's Club AI Hack 2024

    Among the top 5 teams of the fintech track over 150 selected students. Built an application for financial education powered with LLMs, presenting a working demo that could interpret the user’s personal finance situation and give improvement suggestions as well as learning resources.

  • 2024
    First place - Assosoftware Hackathon

    Built an explainable stock picker algorithm to help with the selection of stocks for client portfolios. Project featured in the final Assosoftware conference in Rome.

  • Mentee - Lead The Future

    Among the few Italian students selected as mentees for LeadTheFuture, a leading STEM mentorship non-profit with an acceptance rate below 20%, offering one-on-one guidance from high-impact mentors at the world’s leading innovation hubs such as Silicon Valley and CERN.

  • 2025
    2nd place - Google Developer Student's Club AI Hack 2025

    Built an application for personalised text re-elaboration based on online learning.

  • 2025
    PoliHUB Award Winner - University Startup Challenge 2025

Talks

Skills

Programming Languages: C, C++, Python, R, Matlab, Java, SQL, Solidity
Machine Learning: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Roboflow, MLFlow, Optuna, OpenCV
Software Engineering: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka, Node.js, AWS, git