Luciano Dyballa

Luciano Dyballa is an Assistant Professor of the Computer Science Department at IE University since 2024 and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University under the supervision of Steven Zucker, focusing on machine learning, computer vision, and computational neuroscience. He was then awarded a Swartz Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue his work on manifold inference applied to neural networks, during which he maintained collaborations with renowned groups at UCSF (Stryker Lab), UCLA (Field Lab), and UMass (Yemini Lab). Prior to Yale, he obtained a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science, both from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, and worked as an engineer at Petrobras, performing process optimization and developing software for data mining and natural language processing.

Dr. Dyballa is interested in uncovering the mechanisms and principles behind natural and artificial intelligence and in bridging the gap between biological and deep neural networks. In computational neuroscience, he investigates how populations of neurons represent information collectively and how to infer functional circuits from whole-brain activity data; in machine learning, he studies mechanistic interpretability, unsupervised manifold inference and open-set generalization. He holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (2025–2027) for the project Neurosci-ANN, which applies neuroscience encoding–decoding approaches to explain and compare artificial and biological networks. He has published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Neural Computation and ICLR, and has presented his work at meetings and conferences in computational neuroscience (COSYNE, SfN, NAISys), computer vision (VSS, MODVIS) and artificial intelligence (ICLR).

Corporate Experience

• Process Engineer, Petrobras, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010–2013

Academic Experience

• Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, IE University, Spain, 2024–present
• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (project Neurosci-ANN), IE University, Spain, 2025–2027
• Postdoctoral Associate (Swartz Fellow), Yale University, USA, 2021–2024
• Teaching Fellow, Yale University, USA, 2016–2020

Academic Background

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Yale University, USA, 2021
• M.S. in Computer Science, Yale University, USA, 2018
• M.S. in Computer Science, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2015
• B.S. in Chemical Engineering, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2008