Research
I have a PhD in Particle Physics and I am a Postdoctoral Associate at University of Pittsburgh, but I am based at CERN, in Geneva (Switzerland), where I work within the ATLAS Experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
My main research activities are in the fields of
Data Analysis/Data Science, Data Visualization, Development of Scientific Software.
On my Publications page you can find my scientific papers and publication.
In the last 11 years I have worked on very different topics, which let me acquire a broad knowledge of the needs and the possible issues involved in the design and running a scientific experiment.
In particular my activities focused on:
Current work-in-progress projects
- Design and development of new common tools for interactive data visualization, with a server-client architecture and in-situ characteristics.
- New tools to persistify, handle and serve geometry data. The last phase of this project involves the design and the deployment of RESTful data services on clusters, through graph databases (Neo4j) and search engines (ElasticSearch)
- A Machine Learning + Visualization project, in collaboration with Argonne (US), to classify and analyze events through the analysis of graphical representation of physics data
Recently, I also conceived, promoted and started two interdisciplinary projects, mainly in Digital Humanities, through collaborations with two external Institutes:
- EPFL (Losanne) - Network visualization of collaboration data, focused on the visualization of large collaborations of institutes and people, to extract information about the connections. That project implies complex tasks of scouting, collection and cleaning of very heterogeneous data (papers, theses, reports, HR data, collaboration data, …). The common project is based on the work done at EPFL and it aims at the visualization of data about the ATLAS Collaboration.
- UNIGE (Geneve) - Machine learning techniques applied to computational linguistics.
2012–2017 (“University of Pittsburgh”, USA)
- Development of Scientific Software
- Interactive Data Visualization
- Statistical Data Analysis / Data Science
- Machine learning techniques for data analysis
- Big Data analysis / Grid
- Geometrical data models, handling of geometry data
- Large scale graph data storing, mining and querying
- Networks Visualization
- Detector Description
- Math libraries
- 3D graphics
- Efficient data analysis with C++
- Multi-threading and Parallel Computing
- Parallel Data Analysis
- Developing multi-threaded algorithms for efficient data reduction
- Volunteer Computing
- In-situ data visualization for volunteer computing
- Outreach & Education:
- interactive web-based data visualization for Outraech & Educational projects
- outreach content to explain things and engage. I really think that one of the scientist to-do is to give back some of teh acquired knolwedge to other people: each person has a job, our as scientists is studying, one has to give back
- Persistification of geometry data for HEP Detector Description
- Data modeling for large datasets of heterogeneous data
- Efficient Data handling Algorithms
- Small-memory-footprint modeling of data
- Data persistence
- Virtual Reality for Scientific Data Visualization
2010–2012 (CERN, Switzerland)
- Data Acquisition Systems and experiment’s Run Control
- Big Data Handling and Management
- DB
- RealTime DB
- Data Visualization
- GUI programming
2007–2010 (“Freiburg Universität”, Germany)
- Searches of Supersymmetric (SUSY) particles and Extra Dimensions (UED), SUSY models
- Statistics
- Big Data analysis / Grid
- Design and Development of Data Analysis Frameworks
- Simulation
- MonteCarlo techniques
2006 (“Roma Tre” University, Italy)
- Calibration of the Muon Drift Tubes (MDT) muon detectors
- Statistical Data Analysis
- Simulation of physical systems
- MonteCarlo techniques
2003 (CERN (Switzerland) and “Roma Tre” University (Italy))
- Study of different implementations of multi-threading techniques (NGPT, NPTL) in the Linux Kernel and their effect on the ATLAS Data Flow