Academic | Sándor Battaglini-Fischer

I am a PhD candidate in physics at IFISC, CSIC-UIB, funded by the European Union through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions POSTDIGITAL+ Network and supervised by Prof. Dr. Claudio R. Mirasso and Prof. Dr. Ingo Fischer.

Brain-Inspired Computing with Photonic Oscillators

Based at IFISC (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems), a “Unit of Excellence” between the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), I am part of the POSTDIGITAL+ consortium spread across Europe.

My research lies at the intersection of machine learning, physics (photonics), cognitive/computational neuroscience and mathematics (dynamical systems). The goal is to build bridges between these fields. My belief is that by deeply understanding the learning dynamics of the brain, we can generalize and use these insights to improve current machine learning models and create other intelligent physical systems.

Currently, I am doing computational and theoretical research on oscillatory models and their dynamics. These models share many properties with full-brain dynamics, neural networks and laser dynamics, but remain general and interpretable.

Timeline:

April 2026: Presented preliminary results on the learning dynamics of recurrent Stuart-Landau oscillator networks @ NEXT-AI in Loughborough, UK (best poster award).
October 2025: Started my PhD.

My Notion page · Stuart-Landau simulations

Publications

ICPE '25

FAILS - A Framework for Automated Collection and Analysis of LLM Service Incidents

Sándor Battaglini-Fischer, Nishanthi Srinivasan, Bálint László Szarvas, Xiaoyu Chu, Alexandru Iosup

16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, 2025.

PDF Code Project Page @inproceedings{10.1145/3680256.3721320, author = {Battaglini-Fischer, Sándor and Srinivasan, Nishanthi and Szarvas, Bálint László and Chu, Xiaoyu and Iosup, Alexandru}, title = {FAILS: A Framework for Automated Collection and Analysis of LLM Service Incidents}, year = {2025}, isbn = {9798400711305}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3680256.3721320}, doi = {10.1145/3680256.3721320}, booktitle = {Companion of the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering}, pages = {187--194}, numpages = {8}, keywords = {failure characterization, failure recovery, incident report, llm, operational data analytics, reliability, system design}, location = {Toronto ON, Canada}, series = {ICPE '25} }

Education

PhD in Physics - IFISC, CSIC-UIB, ongoing
Master of Science in Computational Science - University of Amsterdam, 2025
Bachelor of Science in Physics - Technical University of Munich, 2023

For my full CV, please see here.

Selected research projects

Master’s thesis - University of Amsterdam/IFISC, 2025

I investigated delay-coupled networks of Stuart–Landau oscillators as trainable recurrent architectures for sequence processing. The computational model was motivated by laser dynamics and aimed at bridging physics-based oscillator models with machine learning methods.

Key achievements:

Implemented and optimized oscillator networks in JAX with end-to-end training using complex-valued gradients and IMEX integration.
Conducted ablation studies (showing the critical role of coupling and delay buffers in learning capacity) as well as a scaling study.
Analyzed learned dynamics, observing emergent sparsity, spectral properties, and role differentiation within the network.

Thesis · Code

Brain data visualization - University of Amsterdam, 2024

Brain visualization project

Created custom visualization tools for investigating lesion and stimulation dynamics in the human brain using calcium imaging data. Based on the 2023 IEEE SciVis Contest.

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Criminal network analysis - University of Amsterdam, 2024

Citadel criminal network visualization

Contributed to Citadel, a web-based tool to visualize and interact with criminal network graphs. Research project for the Amsterdam Police Department using React, Node.js, and Cytoscape.js and a dataset of the cocaine trafficking network in the Netherlands.

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Chaotic relationship dynamics - University of Amsterdam, 2024

Romantic chaos simulation project

Explored emergent behaviors in complex relationships through “Romantic Chaos” — modeling relationship dynamics using coupled ODEs, analyzing Lyapunov exponents and bifurcation diagrams.

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3D cell culture analysis - Technical University of Munich, 2022

Bachelor thesis on 3D cell culture analysis

Bachelor’s Thesis: Applied a U-Net to analyze complex biological data from 3D cell culture experiments at TUM, supervised by Prof. Dr. Andreas Bausch and Dr. Fabian Englbrecht.

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Work experience

Web Developer/Project Manager @ komDesign, since 2022

Helped with the 2022-2023 redesign of Biogen’s corporate website using Adobe Experience Manager and coordinated the multi-lingual adaptation for the affiliate websites, coordinating teams in 20+ countries and coaching the respective website owners.
Developed a modern, responsive website for a CSR campaign of Biogen Germany using Flask, lightweight frontend components and facial recognition models. The website won the 2025 German Brand Award in the category of “Excellence in Brand Strategy and Creation Branded CSR Activities - Social”.
Various other projects including automation scripts, video and photo editing, and other web development projects.