Decebal Constantin MOCANU

Current position

Prof. Decebal Mocanu is Associate Professor in Machine Learning in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Luxembourg, and Head of the Blue Neural Networks research group. He also serves as Head of the ILIAS Lab (Interdisciplinary Lab for Intelligent and Adaptive Agents), and as Study Director for the BiCS (Bachelor in Computer Science) programme. In addition, he is Associate Expert for the Guild’s AI/Digital Research Heads working group, and University Representative at ERCIM.

Research

To date, Decebal has graduated five PhD students:

Dr. Qiao Xiao (2025, TU Eindhoven) – Postdoctoral researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU Eindhoven)
Dr. Zahra Atashgahy (2024, TU Eindhoven and the University of Twente) – Data Scientist at IKEA AI Labs
Dr. Ghada Sokar (2023, TU Eindhoven) Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, and Guest Assistant Professor at TU Eindhoven. Ghada’s PhD thesis was selected to represent the Mathematics and Computer Science department at the TU/e Science Award 2024.
Dr. Shiwei Liu (2022, TU Eindhoven) – Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and Principal Investigator at ELLIS Institute Tubingen. Shiwei’s PhD thesis received the “cum laude” award and was runner up at Informatics Europe 2023 Best Dissertation Award.
Dr. Anil Yaman (2019, TU Eindhoven) – Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam

In the medium term, Decebal aims to transform Artificial Intelligence from a resource-intensive paradigm into a scalable, energy-efficient, trustworthy, and principled technology. In the long term, he is interested in studying the synergy between artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and network science for the benefit of science and society.

Decebal has contributed to building the research community around efficient and sparse neural networks through pioneering research and 13 tutorials and workshops that he co-organised at major international conferences, including AAAI, IJCAI, ECMLPKDD, ECAI, AAMAS, ICLR, and ICDM. He regularly serves as Area Chair for leading conferences, including ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, IJCAI, and UAI, and for specialized venues such as CoLLAs (Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents). He also acts as evaluator for European research funding programmes, including Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, EIC Pathfinder, and ERC Starting Grants.

Awards

Decebal has received several recognitions, including Best Paper Awards at MoMM 2015, LoG 2022, and the ALA workshop at AAMAS 2022. He received the Outstanding Reviewer Award at NeurIPS 2021. Research visit grants were awarded to him by the University of Pennsylvania (for a visit to Penn) and by RVO, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (for a visit to the University of Texas at Austin), and he was elected to the TU Eindhoven Young Academy of Engineering. Earlier in his career, Decebal obtained third prize at the Romanian National Olympiad in Informatics, and very recently, in 2025, his research was supported by a $200,000 unrestricted gift from Google.org.

Teaching

Decebal designs and teaches machine learning courses at the bachelor’s and master’s levels at the University of Luxembourg. Previously, he designed and taught courses in machine learning and data mining at the University of Twente and TU Eindhoven, with classes of up to 300 students. He has supervised more than 30 MSc and BSc theses, with over one third of the MSc theses receiving a cum laude distinction.

Outreach

Decebal regularly gives invited talks (e.g., the AI seminar at the University of Alberta and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) and keynotes on sparse neural networks, continual learning, and sustainable AI, and contributes to the research community through tutorials, workshops, and conference organization.

Work experience

Before joining the University of Luxembourg, Decebal was an Assistant Professor at the University of Twente and TU Eindhoven. Earlier in his career, he gained several years of industry experience as a software engineer.