Sara Magliacane

Sara Magliacane is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated with the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLab) and the Informatics Institute. She also holds a Research Scientist position at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and has been an ELLIS Scholar since 2022.

• Education
  • PhD in Artificial Intelligence (2017), VU Amsterdam
  • MSc in Computer Engineering (2011), Politecnico di Milano
  • BSc in Computer Engineering (2008), Università degli Studi di Trieste

Research Focus: At the intersection of Causality and Machine Learning, her work addresses

• Causal Representation Learning from high-dimensional data (images, sequences)
• Causal Discovery in latent confounder scenarios
• Causality-inspired Reinforcement Learning for robustness and adaptability
• Neurosymbolic AI for theoretical guarantees

Publication Trends: Her recent work explores

• Factored adaptation in non-stationary environments (NeurIPS 2022)
• Temporal causal identifiability (ICML 2022)
• Binary interaction-based causal discovery (UAI 2023)
• Safe exploration in visual RL (HSCC 2021)
• Structure learning lower bounds (NeurIPS 2020)

Scientific Recognition:

• ELLIS Scholar (2022–present)
• Spotlight presentations at ICML 2022 and ICLR 2022

Advising & Collaborations: Currently supervising 6 PhD students at the University of Amsterdam and AUMC, with 12 alumni advisees. Collaborates with researchers at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Simons Institute, and TUM.