Francesco Ignazio Re is a PhD candidate at ETH Zürich, jointly affiliated with the IVIA Lab and the Center for Security Studies (CSS). He started his PhD in April 2024 and develops machine learning methods for modeling spatio-temporal events, with a focus on supporting United Nations peacekeeping operations. His program is designed as an embedded PhD with the United Nations to foster trans-disciplinary research, including on-site work at UN facilities to collaborate iteratively 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 assess how well machine learning models can predict imminent violence. This partnership was established in 2021, launching a joint research effort on conflict event prediction for UN peacekeeping. Francesco first contributed to this collaboration through his master’s thesis, where he developed a deep-learning model to predict short-term conflict events using techniques adapted from computer vision.

Francesco earned his Master’s degree in Data Science from ETH Zürich and previously completed a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics at the University of Padova. His research interests center on point process models and Bayesian probabilistic models.