Tome Eftimov

Tome Eftimov is a senior researcher at the Computer Systems Department at the Jožef Stefan Institute. He is an assistant professor at the Jožef Stefan International School, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Ljubljana, and the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana. He is a visiting assistant professor at the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University, USA. In addition, he was a research associate at the University of California, San Francisco. He obtained his PhD in Information and Communication Technologies (2018) at the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School. His research interests include statistical data analysis, metaheuristics, natural language processing, representation learning, meta-learning, machine learning, and AutoML. He has presented his work in 97 conference articles, 64 journal articles, and one Springer book published in 2022. The work related to Deep Statistical Comparison was presented as a tutorial or as an invited lecture to several international conferences and universities. He is an organizer of several workshops related to AI at high-ranked international conferences, such as Large Language Models for and with Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2024, 2025, 2026), Benchmarking workshop (GECCO 2020, 2021, 2022, PPSN 2021, IEEE CEC 2021, 2022), AutoDesign4EC (IEEE CEC 2019, 2021, 2022), AutoCIS (IEEE CEC 2025, 2026), BFDNMA (IEEE BigData 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025). From 2024, he is the Vice-Chair of the IEEE Task Force on Automated Algorithm Design, Configuration, and Selection. He is an Editor in Evolutionary Computation Journal and an Associate Editor in Expert Systems with Applications. He is actively involved in national and European research projects and has coordinated bilateral collaborations with Sorbonne University, France (algorithm selection and configuration, in collaboration with an ERC Consolidator Grant winner), Leibniz University Hannover, Germany (fair benchmarking for dynamic algorithm configuration, in collaboration with an ERC Starting Grant and ERC Proof of Concpet winner), and the University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina (theoretical and machine learning approaches for graph data). Currently, he is coordinating a bilateral project with Harvard University, USA. Previously, he coordinated the ARIS postdoctoral project Mr-BEC: Modern Approaches for Benchmarking in Evolutionary Computation, the ARIS ERC complementary scheme project Representation Learning of Landscape Spaces for Explainable Performance of Stochastic Optimization Algorithms, and served as scientific coordinator of the EFSA-funded project CAFETERIA – Information Extraction and Normalization for Food Data. He currently coordinates the HE ERA Chair AutoLearn-SI, the ARIS national project DATA-TRUST, and hosts an MSCA-PF postdoctoral fellowship (AutoLLMSelect).