Me

Do you really want to know more about me?

So, I was born and raised in Modica, a small town in the southern tip of Sicily. What is this place known for? Mostly Baroque architecture and chocolate. Yes. We make a very peculiar kind of chocolate produced by kneading raw cocoa and sugar at a low temperature (around 40˚C).

Generally, I got very lucky with my primary and mid education: I can say I had amazing teachers in many subjects. I really admire them because of the passion they put in their own job. I still remember some classes in particular, for example I have a vivid memory of the day my Science teacher drew the bricked wall of a castle on the blackboard in order to introduce the lesson on cells. He was also my Maths teacher, and introduced me to the intriguing and fun world of ‘Giochi Matematici’ (Mathematical Games), competitions where young students try to solve mathematical and logical competitions. Since then, I took part in these competitions for years and qualified twice to the semi-finals in Milan. I’ve got no doubt these experiences contributed to ignite my interest in Maths – and Combinatorial Maths in particular?

In the meantime, outside of school, I used to practice fencing. My weapon of choice? Foil. In the season 2006/2007 I got the foil regional title in my category. Modica has actually a relatively nice fencing tradition and a competitive fencing school!

At the high school, Mathematical Games became Mathematical Olympiads, still interesting but less “logical”. I took part in the competitions almost every year, with a lot of fun. Although I quit fencing, I practiced tennis for a while. I happened to meet – again – inspiring teachers, especially in the subjects of Science, Maths, Art and Philosophy. Whenever I can, I still come back and visit them at my high school, despite more than ten years have passed now.

What else? As teenagers, those were the years to broaden our horizons: music, cinema, videogames, books. My very first social network has been Last.fm where I still scrobble my listening sessions even today. The difference is that now it’s all Spotify, in the past it has been mostly iTunes! In those years MTV was still a proper music tv channel and it was a must at every single summer breakfast. I also started to play the guitar in those years. Those evenings spent with my friends making covers of our favourite songs are perhaps the best memories I have about my life outside of school. What about videogames? Two in particular caught my heart: Fumito Ueda’s ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. Solitude, devotion, resilience, friendship, detachment, love, despair. Oh, in those years I read, amongst other things, His Dark Materials. Deep. Much deeper than ‘Harry Potter’ ;)

I then decided to take up “Ingegneria Informatica” (Engineering of Information Systems) for my BSc. That was the point I left my hometown behind and moved to Milan – my Alma Mater is Politecnico di Milano. Funnily enough I did not know how to code back then. In my high school there is (was?) a preference to spend more hours on Maths rather than to teach a programming language. But that was ok, I caught up while my class mates were spending more time catching up on function analysis. My final bachelor project was actually kind of fun: We had to write a well-engineered Java programme as the digital version of Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space, a strategic, adrenalinic, horror board game from Italian designers. It’s a great game – I still play this game with my friends even today. Perhaps I will release my Java source code at some point…

I stayed in Milan for my MSc, Computer Science and Engineering. In those years – at least two in Italy – I got exposed to new fields of study which were incredibly fascinating to me: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Systems Theory and Non-liner Dynamics, Complex Networks and Systems – again great teachers. As part of my exam for this course I studied a paper where the authors employed network properties to cluster protein coding-human genes and spot those which may be mostly responsible for certain types of cancer. This study was a sort of abrupt awakening to me. I realised, back then, how all these interesting fields pertaining to Computer Science were somehow intertwined and strictly related to other fields of sciences, some of which, like biology, extremely fascinating for me. Going forward, I did not have to completely sacrifice one for the others, I could study and work on them jointly together, even if with a certain, specific degree of depth.

Almost like an ouroborus, this realisation brought me back to my childhood, when I was madly in love with dinosaurs and, of course, Jurassic Park. The movie, as I remembered, was full of scientists and, in particular, a Mathematician who kept ranting about Chaos Theory. But I could then go beyond the acclaimed Hollywood movie and read the book… which I did. And I found that, despite still fictional, these scientific and mathematical aspects were much deeper in there, and I could then finally appreciate the references after taking my courses in Non-linear System Dynamics and Complex Systems. It was in this spirit that I then decided to take a PhD course in Genomic Computing, and went for a thesis project on Deep Learning for the modelling of epigenetic gene expression regulation. The thesis lasted for around one year… a lot of time during which I kept reading Crichton, and the sequel of Jurassic Park in particular. I found the book even more interspersed with references to Complex Systems and Evolution Theory in particular. But what about the thesis? It ended up having little to do with Deep Learning, in general, as I found out the most interesting modelling aspects were not directly related to it. I ended up conceiving a Genetic Algorithm to compute a stratification of gene populations whose regulation is specifically modelled as a generalised linear function of transcription factor binding and histon mark modification signals. We got quite technical all of a sudden!

In the year of my thesis I made amazing friends to which I am still quite affectionate. Some of them were from Iran and, almost like a game, we started to learn to speak – and also write – Farsi. We also started to cook Persian dishes all together; those moments were surely the apex of my uni days. If you have never tried the Persian cuisine, definitely check that out, it’s amongst my favourite ones.

Back to techical stuff… From my thesis work I published a paper in the proceedings of the 2018 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks – it was hosted in Brazil back then, such a shame my advisors went there instead of me. A few months afterwards, another follow-up work from my thesis got accepted at the 2018 conference on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics. That was held in Caparica (close to Lisbon) instead, and I managed to fly there and present my paper in person. It was my very first conference, and probably the one I liked the most so far. It was ‘intimate’, attended by clever people, settled in the beautiful location.

Well, at this point, the rest of the story you can derive it from the remaining pages of this website, right?

My personal website has been realised through Jekyll and Github Pages. The theme — slightly customised — is by orderedlist. Drop me a message if you'd fancy a chat!