About
Biography
I am an Associate Professor (SSD INFO-01/A, ex INF/01 – Computer Science) in the Department of Enterprise Engineering at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”.
I lead the Semantic Analytics Group (SAG) and contribute to the Artificial Intelligence at Tor Vergata (ART) network.
My work sits at the intersection of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Multimodality, with a consistent focus on transparency, sustainability, and impactful applications.
Research Vision
I pursue methods that connect rigorous learning theory with deployable AI systems.
The common thread is to make neural architectures transparent, sustainable, and multimodal, while scaling to real data and real users.
Core areas
- Large Language Models & Generative AI — instruction tuning, continual and multi-task learning, efficient adaptation, evaluation.
- Machine Learning for NLP — kernel methods and neural networks; syntactic/semantic parsing; information extraction.
- Semantic Search & Evidence-based AI — retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), fact verification, adaptive IR.
- Multimodality & Grounding — language–vision models for captioning, VQA, and situated reasoning.
- Human–Robot Interaction — spoken language understanding and context-aware, adaptive interfaces.
- Ethics & Transparency — interpretability, fairness, and “ethics-by-design” methodologies.
Application domains
Beyond foundational research, my work has been applied across a wide range of domains:
- Digital Tourism — sentiment analysis of reviews, reputation monitoring, adaptive recommender systems.
- Finance & Public Administration — semantic search and compliance for regulatory and financial documents.
- Social Media & Society — misinformation detection, sentiment and opinion mining, epidemic trend discovery.
- Public Safety & Security — AI systems for text analysis and crime tracking.
- Industrial & Environmental Monitoring — neural approaches for wastewater control, environmental analytics.
- Media & Accessibility — sentiment analysis for broadcasting, intelligent assistants for accessibility.
- Healthcare & Medicine — epidemic intelligence, cancer diagnostics, medical robotics, privacy-preserving ML.
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science and Control Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (2012).
Thesis: Structured Learning for Natural Language Semantic Processing. - M.Sc. in Computer Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (2008, 110/110 cum laude).
- Licensed as Professional Engineer (2009).
Academic Qualifications
- National Scientific Qualification (Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale) as Associate Professor in:
- Informatics (01/B1), valid 2020–2029
- Computer Systems (09/H1), valid 2020–2029
Professional Experience
- Associate Professor, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (since 2025).
- Assistant Professor (RTD-A/RTD-B), University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (2015–2020).
- Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (2012–2014).
- Visiting Researcher, University of Colorado Boulder (2011).
- Research Member, SAG & ART groups (since 2008).