Rate My Professor Alessandra Russo

Alessandra Russo is Professor in Applied Computational Logic in the Department of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, at Imperial College London, where she leads the Structured and Probabilistic Intelligent Knowledge Engineering (SPIKE) research group. Appointed Head of the Department of Computing effective from 1 July 2024, she also holds the position of Convenor and Co-Director of the School of Human and Artificial Intelligence and Co-Director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted AI since September 2021. She leads the Imperial-X research initiative on Intelligible AI. Her research specializations encompass computational logic, knowledge representation and reasoning, symbolic machine learning, and probabilistic and distributed inference. These are applied to domains including intelligent autonomous systems, cybersecurity, distributed control systems for sensor networks, and healthcare. Russo has pioneered state-of-the-art symbolic machine learning systems such as LAS (Learning from Answer Set Programs) and ILASP (Inductive Learning of Answer Set Programs), which enable learning interpretable logical rules from labelled data. Her group further develops neuro-symbolic approaches integrating deep learning and probabilistic inference with symbolic methods to achieve generalization and transfer learning from multimodal unstructured data.

Russo earned her PhD from Imperial College London in 1996 with a thesis on Modal Labelled Deductive Systems under supervisors Dov Gabbay and Krysia Broda, following an MSc in Computer Science from the same institution and an undergraduate degree in Biology. Her career at Imperial College London progressed from Research Associate (1997–2001) and Lecturer (from 2001) to her current professorship. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and has received the Imperial College Rector's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2011) and the President's Award for Research Supervision (2020). Russo has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in leading artificial intelligence and software engineering conferences and journals. She previously served as Editor-in-Chief of IET Software, Associate Editor of ACM Computing Surveys, and is currently Associate Editor of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming for logic and machine learning. She contributes to professional activities including external examining for MSc programs and appointment panels.