Profile

I was born in Cosenza, the second largest city of the poorest region of Italy, Calabria (see picture below). I was lucky enough to receive a computer for Christmas when I was a child in the early 90s. Playing old video games (such as Prince of Persia, Wolfenistein or Red Baron), and tinkering with the computer itself, significantly shaped my professional decisions at university. It was a different time, my computer was as big as half a desk and was about 600 times less powerful than a Google Pixel 1 phone. Probably this approach wouldn’t work today.

My high school studies focused on humanistic subjects, such as literature, philosophy, history, Latin and ancient Greek and also sciences like chemistry, earth sciences, biology, physics and math. In Italy the school’s curriculum is fixed and those were the subjects studied at the “Liceo Classico”, which is a sort of Grammar School but not (anymore) as exclusive as it is in the UK.

Following my passion for computers, I start my studies in Computer Engineering at University of Calabria (see picture below), the local university, where I learn the basements of engineering (digital systems, software engineering, advanced math etc.). Returning from my experience as Erasmus student in Brussels, I pursue my master in Computer Engineering in La Sapienza University of Rome, focusing more on Artificial Intelligence (machine learning, neural networks, robotics, etc.). Finally I start a PhD in Robotic Grasping at King’s College London, which I completed last year while working as a Software Engineer first, and a Research Engineer more recently.

Apart from that and I enjoy playing all sorts of video games,although, due to lack of time, it has been few years that I play only with old videogames, those of the 1990s or late 1980s. Those games are the one I was used to play when I was younger. I enjoy playing them because I like to see how different things were before, and how things changed when compared to present days. I also like playing also different sorts of unorthodox board games. Games where the purpose is to lie and to fool other players (Avalon or Mafia), to those where you need to elaborate a complex business or military strategy (Agricola or Game of Thrones). More recently, I started diving in building naval models which is something I thought to be very complicated, but, if you are careful and patient, it is not as challenging as it looks.

Despite being Italian, I am terrible at football and I don’t follow the Italian’s premier league (Serie A) that much, but I still have in my heart my local football team. I enjoyed playing different sports, like basketball or tennis, but the one I like to most is fencing and I was used to participate in UK epee competitions when I was less busy.

I like travelling a lot with my wife, especially out of Europe, as I already visited many EU countries. I often spend the evening watching movies and TV series, some my favorite ones were the Lobster (movie), Westworlds (TV Series), the Money Heist, The Handmaid and other more or less known ones. I am father of a little 4-years-old girl.

My typical day is very variable, which is something very common if you work in research whether is academic research or research for a company.

Roughly, my day is made of different activities, sometimes I do them all other times I do only some of them. Some activities are very similar to an academic researcher but performed with a different pitch.

The main responsibility of a research engineer is to explore different research (i.e. reading scientific papers) and propose and try out different algorithms (ways of doing something) found on papers and the web. The driving force here is solving a problem in a new way rather than finding new ways of doing something never attempted before. This is the main difference with an academic researcher.

Once some new technique has been identified, it is tried out on a prototype to see the result. Afterwards, we observe how good that solution was, which are the limitation and how can be improved further if needed. Since we are trying to solve a problem, we are not obliged to find a new way of doing things (which is something academics have to do). Even a old approach (maybe implemented differently e.g. using an integrated circuit – electronics – instead of a software) is acceptable as long as it does the job.

Another part of the same job is to build up all the “plumbing”, which is all the software which allows the new stuff to work. This part of the job is closer to a traditional software engineer job, as we have to develop things like reading information from files, connect two software parts together via web etc. The difference with a software engineer is that we don’t need to be as formal as them (although it is beneficial) because we develop a prototype which will need some improvement anyway. For example, we are not interested in developing a user interface (a window with buttons and graphics) easy to use for a technician because our software will not be used immediately to technicians to operate the robot, because it will have to be made better (e.g. more fast, less likely to break etc., it’s a prototype after all).

Probably the bread and butter of my work is a crossover between and academic researcher which is not obliged to find novel problems or approaches and a (software) engineer which doesn’t have to develop software in such a formal way as they normally do (software engineers have a strict procedure which they must always follow).

In my day there are also other things: attending research meetings (where we discuss our results), discuss with managers the results, writing reports and writing scientific publications, but most of my day is split between being an engineer and being a researcher.