Embedded Phd - Machine Learning Advancements to Support UN Peacekeeping

Francesco Ignazio Re is a PhD candidate at ETH Zurich, jointly affiliated with the Center for Security Studies (CSS) and the external page IVIA Lab at the Computer Science department. He started his PhD in April 2024, and focuses on researching machine learning methods for modeling spatio-temporal events, specifically aimed at supporting UN peacekeeping operations. His program is designed as an embedded-PhD with the United Nations to foster trans-disciplinary research, which includes on-site work at UN facilities to facilitate iterative collaboration with domain experts.

The project benefits from a partnership between the Center for Security Studies and the UN Operations Crisis Centre, which provides internal event data to evaluate the effectiveness of machine learning models in predicting imminent violence. This partnership was established in 2021, launching a joint research effort to explore the feasibility of an event-prediction system for UN peacekeeping. Francesco firstly contributed to this collaboration through his master’s thesis, which involved developing a deep-learning model to predict short-term conflict events using techniques adapted from computer vision. Francesco obtained his Master’s degree in Data Science from ETH Zurich and previously completed a bachelor’s degree in Statistics at the University of Padova.

His research interests focus on the task of event-forecasting using diverse data paradigms, including traditional tabular event data, unstructured data from organizational archives, and expert opinions aggregated through bayesian sequential algorithms.