Curriculum Vitae

AI Engineer · Studio Jadu

Zürich, Switzerland — hybrid

Building multimodal text–image–video models for Studio Jadu's animation pipeline: tooling that extends what a small team can produce, with artists and storytellers directing the work at every step.

Visiting researcher — text-to-image generative models · University of Zurich — Digital Society Initiative

Zürich, Switzerland

Interpretability of text-to-image generative models, under the supervision of Dr. Eva Cetinić.

• Training data attribution — working out what a generated image owes to the specific examples it was trained on.
• Sparse autoencoder feature analysis on the vision encoders that condition these models, CLIP and DINO.

PhD candidate, Computer Science & Mathematics · University of Bari Aldo Moro

Bari, Italy

Vision–language models and multimodal AI at CILab, supervised by Prof. Giovanna Castellano and Prof. Gennaro Vessio, funded by Italy's NRRP Mission 4. Two threads run through it: getting these models to hold up in a domain as demanding as art, and working out how they arrive at what they say. Thesis submitted September 2026; defence expected December 2026.

• ArtSeek — a multimodal RAG system pairing late-interaction retrieval (ColQwen2) with agentic reasoning. Its classification head re-uses the retriever's own vision encoder through multi-task learning, reaching state of the art on artwork attribute classification.
• I Dream My Painting (WACV 2025) — the first work on multi-mask inpainting: several regions filled at once, each from its own prompt, in a single generation pass rather than one region at a time.
• Label Anything (ECAI 2025) — few-shot semantic segmentation driven by visual prompts, state of the art on COCO-20ⁱ among multi-class methods.
• WikiFragments — a Wikipedia-scale multimodal dataset, over 5M image–text pairs across 42M examples.
• Large-scale training on the CINECA LEONARDO supercomputer through an EuroHPC ISCRA allocation.

Software engineer — research collaboration · National Research Council of Italy (CNR) — Institute for Educational Technologies

Palermo, Italy — remote

Natural language processing for education, carrying on from the text complexity work I had started in my BSc thesis.

• Built NLP tooling for dyslexia detection in Python and spaCy.
• Contributed to COURAGE, an EU-funded social media literacy platform, on Django and Vue.js.

Student, Samsung Innovation Campus · Samsung Italy & University of Bari Aldo Moro

Bari, Italy

Samsung Italy's training programme, run with the University of Bari. Selected among 25 students and placed in the top five on the final project, winning a scholarship.

• Built SmartGym, an Android app that counts exercise repetitions from the camera with an on-device computer vision model.

MSc in Computer Science — Artificial Intelligence110/110 cum laude

University of Bari Aldo Moro · Bari, Italy

The AI curriculum, and the two years where the research direction actually formed: the thesis grew straight out of the coursework and became my first paper.

CourseworkMachine Learning · Deep Learning · Natural Language Processing · Computer Vision · Fundamentals of AI · Information Theory

Leveraging VLP and Transformer Models to Describe Artworks with ChatGPT Data

BSc in Computer Science110/110 cum laude

University of Bari Aldo Moro · Bari, Italy

A broad computer science foundation — mathematics, algorithms, software engineering, databases — with the first machine learning courses that pointed where I ended up.

CourseworkMathematics — discrete and analysis · Algorithms & Data Structures · Object-Oriented Programming · Software Engineering · Machine Learning · Databases

Creazione di un Tool per la Valutazione della Complessità del Testo