Bio

I am a research scientist and research-focused engineer interested in the Internet of Things, mobile, and cloud computing. My experience focuses on system decentralization, performance optimization, and privacy/security awareness. My ultimate goal is to innovate and apply the experience I matured while working at Northeastern University, Imperial College London, MIT Media Lab, and Politecnico di Milano to impact our everyday lives.

In this page you can find more information on my skills and on what I have done.

Areas of expertise

  • Cybersecurity and privacy for the Internet of Things: contributed to the ReCon project at Northeastern University, which resulted in several top-conference publications. Managed the first-of-its-kind Mon(IoT)r Lab (IoT Lab) at Northeastern University. Experience with network traffic measurement and in running experiments at a scale.
  • Mobile computing: involved in the Toshiba-funded ShAir project at MIT Media Lab, where I designed and developed a middleware platform for mobile content sharing and organized two internal workshops.
  • Cloud computing: secured a personal funding of €222K from the EU to carry out at Imperial College London original work of cloud computing optimization.
  • Self-adaptive service-oriented systems: carried out three research projects on this topic while working at Politecnico di Milano, which resulted in the publications of several deliverables and papers.

Technologies

  • Languages: (expert) Java, C, (medium) MATLAB, SQL, Python.
  • Development and testing tools: JUnit, TestNG, Mockito, Maven, Gradle, Hudson/Jenkins, SonarQube, Subversion, Git.
  • OSes and platforms: Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Android, Amazon AWS.
  • Office: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Keynote, Omnigraffle, Google Docs, LaTeX.

Supervision, organization, and leadership

  • Mentored students across all levels (PhD, M.S., B.S.) and on multiple institutions (Politecnico di Milano, MIT, Northeastern University), including theses supervision.
  • Served as program committee member at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’21)
  • Served as web chair for the 17th ACM International Measurement Conference (IMC’18)
  • Served as chair for the poster and demo program at the 15th IEEE International Conference of Autonomic Computing (ICAC’18)
  • Served as social and web chair of the 2015 ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE ’15).
  • Served as poster chair at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing systems (SASO’13).
  • Served in the program committee at the Workshop on Agents for Complex Systems ACSys 2011 and ACSys 2012.
  • Served as external reviewer for over 20 conferences.

Work Experiences

  • 02/2017 – current
    • Northeastern University, College of Computer and Information Science, Boston, MA, USA
    • Associate Research Scientist
    • Team member of project BehavIoT, ProperData, and founder member of the Mon(IoT)r Lab,  all funded by the National Science Foundation. Former team member of project ReCon funded by the US Department of Homeland Security.
  • 10/2020 – 06/2021
    • Consumer Reports, Digital Lab, Yonkers, NY, USA
    • Digital Lab Non-resident Fellow
    • Leader of project: “Consumer IoT Privacy: Measurement at Scale and Protection for Smart Speakers”
  • 12/2014 – 12/2016
    • Imperial College London, Department of Computing, London, UK
    • Marie Curie Research Fellow
    • Leader of project SPANDO: Self-organising Performance Prediction and Optimisation
  • 02/2013 – 10/2014
    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA
    • Post-doctoral Research Fellow
    • Team member of projects ShAir and SERS in collaboration with Toshiba, MathWorks, Boeing, BluAptic, National Instruments, and several other institutions.
  • 01/2011 – 01/2013
    • Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering, Milan, Italy
    • Teaching and Research Assistant
  • 09/2010 – 12/2010
    • IBM Haifa Research Lab, Haifa, Israel
    • Research Intern

Qualifications

  • 2008 – 2011
    • PhD, Information Technology
    • Politecnico di Milano, Italy
    • Thesis: Self-organizing Methods and Models for Software Development
  • 2005 – 2007
    • MSc (Master of Science), Computer Science
    • University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA
  • 2004 – 2007
    • Laurea Specialistica (equivalent to MEng, Master of Engineering), Information Engineering
    • Politecnico di Milano, Italy
  • 2001 – 2004
    • Laurea (equivalent to BEng, Bachelor of Engineering), Information Engineering
    • Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Achievements

  • 05/2021. €25K for reaching the TOP 10 (among 180 submissions) in the Telekom Challenge by T-Labs to build the first prototype of IoTrimmer (a tool for blocking non-essential IoT traffic)
  • 10/2020. Invited Talk: Sonos voice experience team, Paris, France
  • 07/2020. Invited Talk: PrivacyCon 2020 – organized by FTC, Washington D.C., USA
  • 06/2020. $50K Digital Lab Fellowship by Consumer Reports to support privacy research for smart speakers.
  • 10/2019. Community contribution award 2019: ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2019
  • 10/2019. Invited Talk: Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy
  • 06/2017. $5K Amazon EC2 research credits: Secured personal research credits funded by Amazon to support privacy research at Northeastern University
  • 06/2017. $20K Microsoft Azure research credits: Secured personal research credits funded by Microsoft to support privacy research at Northeastern University
  • 09/2016. Invited talk: Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
  • 10/2015. Best paper award 2015: IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Autonomic Computing
  • 09/2015. Invited talk: Gran Sasso Research Institute, L’Aquila, Italy
  • 12/2014.  €221K Personal Marie Curie grant: Secured a personal grant funded by the EU to support the SPANDO project at Imperial College London
  • 06/2014. Invited demo: Reached the final phase of the SmartAmerica challenge with project SERS sponsored by the US government
  • 03/2014. Invited talk: Politecnico di Milano, Italy
  • 02/2014. $24K Personal Toshiba grant: Secured a personal grant funded by Toshiba Corporation to support the ShAir project at MIT Media Lab
  • 02/2013. $42K Personal Rocca grant: Secured a personal grant funded by Fondazione Rocca to support the MobileP2P project at MIT Media Lab
  • 06/2012. $10K Amazon research grant: Secured a departmental grant funded by Amazon to support Cloud Computing research at Politecnico di Milano
  • 06/2011. Invited talk: University of Timisoara, Romania

Mentoring

Teaching

  • 2011 – 2012
    • Software Engineering (48 hours)
    • Politecnico di Milano
    • Software engineering and object oriented programming of mobile applications
  • 2008 – 2012
    • Computer Science B (132 hours)
    • Politecnico di Milano
    • Basic computer science course

Tutoring

  • 2017 – current
    • The Mon(IoT)r Lab
    • Northeastern University
    • undergraduate and graduate students supervision
  • 2017 – 2018
    • ReCon Project for CS4700/CS5700 (Fundamentals of Computer Networking)
    • Northeastern University
    • all course students eligible to participate (30+ students per year)
  • 2013 – 2014
    • UROP Student supervision program
    • MIT Media Lab
    • 2 undergraduate students
  • 2010 – 2013
    • Ph.D supervision
    • Politecnico di Milano
    • 2 Ph.D students
  • 2007 – 2013
    • Master theses supervision
    • Politecnico di Milano
    • 4 graduate students