Prof Ing. Gianluca Valentino obtained a First Class Honours undergraduate degree in communications and computer engineering from the University of Malta in 2010. He was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Malta in 2013 for the development of a fast and automatic procedure for the alignment of collimation system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has been of great benefit to its operation by minimizing the beam time required.
From 2013 to 2016, Prof Ing. Valentino was a Marie Curie Action CERN-COFUND postdoctoral fellow within the Beams department at CERN, responsible for the collimation control software and the development and commissioning of 18 new collimators with embedded Beam Position Monitors, which were installed during Long Shutdown 1. As a member of the LHC collimation team, he was recognised by the CERN director-general for extraordinary service.
As of 2015, Prof Ing. Valentino is the UM team leader within the ALICE collaboration at CERN, in which he has helped to develop a novel automatic luminosity levelling procedure which has been adopted by the ALICE experiment, and has worked on pattern recognition algorithms to improve detector event reconstruction following the increase in data foreseen for Run 3.
In 2016, he took up the position of Resident Academic at the Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, teaching in the areas of machine learning, pattern recognition and telecommunications. He maintains a position a Visiting Scientist at CERN, where he continues to provide expertise for the LHC Collimation Project, and conducts research in the area of machine learning for particle accelerators related to control, anomaly detection and pattern recognition. He has delivered several invited talks at various labs such as SLAC, CERN, PSI and HZB about these research activities.
Prof Ing. Valentino has successfully led a number of competitively funded projects financed by MCST in the area of Earth Observation, making use of computer vision and AI techniques to enhance and exploit satellite imagery.
He has authored and co-authored over 120 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and has participated in several public engagement and science communication activities.
