Academic Journey

I was born in Treviso, Italy, and worked seven years in the timber industry before moving into academia. I earned a bachelor’s degree in Statistics and Information Systems for Business Management (2009), a master’s degree summa cum laude (2014), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (2019), all at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

My research interests gravitate toward Structural Pattern Recognition and Machine/Deep Learning, but they don’t end there: Network & Data Science, Natural Language Processing, and, what first stole my academic heart, Computer Vision.

After starting my academic career in 2019 with postdoctoral work on structural analysis, I joined ODYCCEUS in 2020, a EU-funded research project focused on cultural conflict and antisemitism, using large-scale NLP and network analysis.

In 2021, I collaborated with the IESE Business School (University of Navarra, Barcelona) on the project “Breaking the Echo Chambers”, analyzing exclusive Facebook data to study information diffusion across polarized groups. Later the same year, I joined Ca' Foscari’s Department of Management for a project on sustainability and network-based approaches. Next, in 2022, I collaborated on the Horizon 2020 ISEED project, focused on citizen science and democratic engagement.

I am currently a non-tenured assistant professor (RTDa) at Ca’ Foscari, contributing to the European project iNEST (Interconnected Nord-Est Innovation Ecosystem).

Beyond these projects, I pursue research on graph-based approaches and neural networks, and I regularly serve as a referee for international journals (e.g., Pattern Recognition, Journal of Complex Networks) and conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ICPR).

Visiting Positions

Oct. 2024 — Visiting Researcher, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU, HKG).  

Oct.–Nov. 2019 — Visiting Researcher, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech, Shenzhen, CHN). 

Feb.–Mar. 2018 — Visiting PhD Student, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University (Birmingham, UK).  

May–Jul. 2017 — Visiting PhD Student, Department of Computer Science, University of York (UK).