Marco D’Ambros is the director of CodeLounge, the R&D Center of the Software Institute at Università della Svizzera italiana. CodeLounge blends academic knowledge and industry experience to pursue both fundamental and applied research in software engineering. Marco earned his PhD in 2010, specializing in mining software repositories. After that, he joined Palantir Technologies, a leading Silicon Valley data analytics & AI firm, where he helped government agencies and major enterprises analyze large-scale, fragmented data, leading technical project execution worldwide. Since returning to academia, Marco has led numerous research and development projects at CodeLounge. His work spans several domains including artificial intelligence, natural language processing, software quality assessment, and software engineering. Marco’s contributions to the research community have earned him international recognition. Notably, he received the Distinguished Paper Award at ESEC/FSE 2022 (International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering), and the Most Influential Paper Award at MSR 2020 (International Conference on Mining Software Repositories).