CV
Curriculum vitae of Gloria Desideri.
Contact Information
| Name | Gloria Desideri |
| Professional Title | PhD Student in Continual Reinforcement Learning |
| 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