Paolo Costa

About

News and Events

• Honoured to co-chair HotNets 2026 (opens in new tab). This year we have introduced a number of changes (opens in new tab) to the review and participation process. Feedback is much welcome!
• Excited to be part of Microsoft Research’s “What’s next in AI for 2026” outlook, sharing my perspective on optical interconnects and why they could be a game-changer for next-generation AI infrastructure and models.
• Our paper “MOSAIC: Breaking the Optics versus Copper Trade-off with a Wide-and-Slow Architecture and MicroLEDs” received the Best Paper Award (opens in new tab) at ACM SIGCOMM 2025.

Short Bio

I am a Partner Research Manager in the Future AI Infrastructure group of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge and an Honorary Lecturer with the Department of Computing (opens in new tab) of Imperial College London (opens in new tab).

In the past, I had been a research faculty at Imperial College London (opens in new tab) and, prior to that, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Systems (opens in new tab) group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (opens in new tab). I hold a M. Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano (opens in new tab).

Research Interests

I am an experimental computer scientist. I validated my ideas through prototypes to understand, model, and verify observations. My current research brings together hardware, optics, networking, and application-level expertise to take a cross-stack approach to developing next-generation data-center networks and interconnects, leveraging the availability of emerging hardware and optical technologies.

In the past, among other things, I have been working on the CamCube and Predictable Datacenters projects, aiming to providing a better integration and synergy between applications and networks in data centers to improve performance and reduce complexity. More details can be found here.