Leonardo Cella joins AIPIA's Technical-Scientific Committee

Leonardo Cella joins AIPIA’s Technical-Scientific Committee with effect from 21 September 2026. A PhD in Computer Science, he is a quantitative power trader and machine learning specialist, and brings to the Committee a path running through academic research and machine learning systems operating in production in energy markets.

The Technical-Scientific Committee is one of the four bodies set out in article 6 of the Statute, alongside the President, the Board and the Members’ Assembly. It oversees the methodological validity and scientific coherence of the association’s work, draws up guidelines, ethical standards and professional good practice, and reviews the quality of the projects AIPIA promotes.

Academic-grade research and systems that have to work

His doctorate, defended at the University of Milan with a thesis on efficiency and realism in stochastic bandits, focused on reinforcement learning. Between 2020 and 2022 Cella was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Statistics and Machine Learning group at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, working on non-stationary bandits and meta-learning in collaboration with researchers from META, Google and École Polytechnique. The work from that period was published at the field’s main venues: NeurIPS, AISTATS and ICML.

Before that came an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano with a specialisation in machine learning, and a period at Amazon as an Applied Scientist.

Models that decide every day

Since 2024 he has been Lead Quantitative Power Trader at Duferco Energia, where he built from scratch an automated algorithmic trading system, continuously available and low latency, for the Italian continuous intraday market, and led the definition and implementation of its strategies. He extended the setup developed for Italy to several European markets and led the development of an in-house machine-learning model for wind generation forecasting. Before that, at Axpo Italia, he had been Senior Data Scientist on portfolio forecasting and on machine learning applications to imbalance trading.

This is a setting in which models do not produce recommendations to be weighed at leisure: they make continuous operational decisions and are judged on their results. People who work here learn quickly the difference between a model that works and a model that seemed to work, and they learn it over a short horizon.

What he brings to the Committee

The competence Cella adds is that of someone who can recognise when a result only holds on the data it was built from. It is a distinction the Committee has to make often, because methodological validity is exactly what it answers for, and because the guidelines it produces have to hold when the data changes too.

Energy markets are also one of the sectors where artificial intelligence is already operational at industrial scale, with immediate and verifiable economic consequences: a demanding test bed for the professional good practice the association promotes.

There is finally a question of method. Building a system that runs without interruption means dealing with everything around the model: the quality of the incoming data, the behaviour when a source stops responding, the way a result is measured afterwards. These are the same questions that separate a useful guideline from a statement of principle.

The Technical-Scientific Committee holds no powers of representation: legal representation of the association rests with the President under the Statute, and no member of the Committee can bind AIPIA. The body’s contribution is technical and methodological.

Where to read more

The Leonardo Cella profile sets out his professional background in full. The current membership of the body is on the Technical-Scientific Committee page.