I have a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, all received from the University of Milano-Bicocca (Milano, Italy).
My PhD thesis was titled “Evolutionary Inference of Biological Systems Accelerated on Graphics Processing Units“. My advisor was Professor Giancarlo Mauri.
I am Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics (DAIS) of the Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy).
I am the Rector’s delegate for Digital Innovation for Research.
I am guest researcher at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, Eindhoven, The Netherlands).
I am Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence.
I am part of the B4 — Bicocca Bioinformatics, Biostatistics and Bioimaging inter-departmental research center (Italy).
I am part of the SYSBIO / ISBE-IT Centre for Systems Biology (Milan, Italy).
I am member of EAISI — Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).
I am Senior member of IEEE. I am member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
I am vice chair of the IEEE Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee. In this context, I have been Chair of the Task Force for “Advanced Representation” of candidate solutions in bio-medical research from 2019 to 2023.
I am member of EACVI (European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging) and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).
I am currently member of the COST Action CA21169 “Information, Coding, and Biological Function: the Dynamics of Life (DYNALIFE)”. I belong to the Working Group “Statistical and probabilistic modelling and analysis, bioinformatics and machine learning”.
Some past affiliations and activities
From 2022 to 2024 I have been Associate Editor for Frontiers in Genetics, specialty section Computational Genomics. I have been guest editor for IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (CIM).
Between 2016 and 2019 I have been member of the ICT COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications”. I belonged to the Working Group 3 “HPC-enabled Modelling for Life Sciences” and I have been leader of the Case Study “Towards Human Cell Simulation”.
Research interests
My main research interest is Computational Intelligence in many forms: Evolutionary Computation (EC), Swarm Intelligence (SI), Fuzzy Logic (FL), Machine Learning (ML).
I extensively exploit creative combinations of such techniques to create automatic tools able to tackle complex problems in Healthcare, Systems Biology, Synthetic Biology, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Imaging.
EC, SI, and ML methods provide powerful means to tackle hard computational problems; however, these approaches are computationally demanding activities. For this reason, I also work on the optimization and acceleration of algorithms. In particular, I largely rely on high-performance infrastructures, in particular clusters of GPUs, to leverage the relevant computational power offered by new generation accelerators.
You can find a summary of my published projects in the front page.
Awards
🏅 “Shark Tank” award at CMR 2024 (the Global Cardiac Magnetic Resonance conference), London, UK for the talk “Optimizing Inversion Time Prediction for Late Gadolinium Enhancement Imaging with Artificial Intelligence” (2024)
🏅 Best abstract award at the 83th Congress of the Italian Cardiology Society (SIC) for the paper “Techniques of Artificial Intelligence for the determination of the optimal inversion time: the Thaiti project” (2022)
Nominated for best paper award at the 2020 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)
Nominated for best paper award at the 2023 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)
Academic profiles
Non Academic Stuff
I play the guitar synth, the electric guitar, and a Commodore 64 configured as a synthesizer. You can find some of my compositions on Soundcloud profile.