Giacomo Balloccu is a Research Scientist at Meta London and holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science from the University of Cagliari, where he recently completed his PhD in Recommender Systems. His research lies at the intersection of knowledge-based explainable recommendation, reinforcement learning, and language models, with a particular focus on enhancing user experience and understanding business impact. Giacomo has presented his work at premier conferences like SIGIR and ECIR and published in esteemed journals, including Elsevier’s Knowledge-Based Systems. He has also delivered tutorials on explainable recommender systems at RecSys 2022 and ECIR 2024.

In addition to his academic achievements, Giacomo gained industry experience through two Applied Scientist internships at Amazon Ads in Edinburgh. He served for three years as a teaching assistant in Algorithms and Data Structures and is part of many mentorship programs such as LeadTheFuture Mentorship (Since 2022), undergraduate supervision for research thesis and 1 to 1 mentorship.