People

I am an Assistant Professor (RTD-A) of Computer Science within the SySMA research unit of IMT Lucca.  Previously I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Côte d’Azur (Nice, France) as member of the Maasai team and at Università di Siena at the Siena Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAILab). I recived my Ph.D. in Computer Science (Smart Computing) from the Universities of Florence, Pisa, and Siena in 2020.

My research interests lie in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, I focus on studying Machine Learning algorithms for processing data streams that exhibit dynamical properties. My research encompasses both theoretical exploration and practical applications in Computer Vision. From the theoretical standpoint, I have proposed and developed a framework rooted in Calculus of Variations for interpreting laws of learning. In the visual domain, I have applied these ideas to develop learning agents that utilize deep architectures to extract features that consider motion-induced regularities. Currently, I am working on formulating online continual learning in a principled manner, aiming to investigate the relationship between learning problems over time and optimal control.

In addition to these activities, I have recently studies a singular transport equation that arises as a formal limit of the discrete open mancala game.

Prior to my PhD, I obtained a Master’s Degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Pisa. During my master’s studies, I focused on investigating the large-N CP(N-1) sigma model on a finite interval in connection with solitonic solutions, which are believed to be relevant for the problem of confinement in QCD.

• (with Marco Gori and Stefano Melacci) Machine Learning, A Constraint-Based Approach (Cambridge, Mass.: Morgan Kaufmann) Second Edition March 2023, xviii+537 pp.

• (with Marco Gori and Stefano Melacci) Deep Learning to See, Towards New Foundations of Computer Vision (Cham: Springer, 2022), xiv+105 pp. (SpringerBriefs in Computer Science).

• (with Giovanni Bellettini, Maurizio Paolini) A free boundary singular transport equation as a formal limit of a discrete dynamical system. Journal of Differential Equations 396, (2024).

• (with Lapo Faggi, Dario Zanca, Stefano Melacci and Marco Gori) Local Propagation of Visual Stimuli in Focus of Attention. Neurocomputing 560 (2023).

• (with Giuseppe Boccignone, Lapo Faggi, Marco Gori and Stefano Melacci) Visual Features and Their Own Optical Flow. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 4 (2021).

• (with Marco Gori and Stefano Melacci) Learning Visual Features Under Motion Invariance. Neural Networks 126 (2020), 275–299.

• (with Marco Gori and Stefano Melacci) Cognitive Action Laws: The Case of Visual Features. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 31 (2020), 938–949.

• (with Marco Gori) The Principle of Least Cognitive Action. Theoretical Computer Science 633 (2016), 83–99.

• (with Michele Casoni, Marco Gori, Simone Marullo, Stefano Melacci, Matteo Tiezzi) Neural Time-Reversed Generalized Riccati Equation. The Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24).

• (with Matteo Tiezzi, Simone Marullo, Lapo Faggi, Enrico Meloni and Stefano Melacci) Stochastic Coherence Over Attention Trajectory For Continuous Learning In Video Streams. Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-22).

• (with Matteo Tiezzi, Simone Marullo, Enrico Meloni, Lapo Faggi, Marco Gori and Stefano Melacci) Foveated Neural Computation. In: Amini, MR., Canu, S., Fischer, A., Guns, T., Kralj Novak, P., Tsoumakas, G. (eds) Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. ECML PKDD 2022.

• (with Matteo Tiezzi, Stefano Melacci, Marco Maggini and Marco Gori) Focus of Attention Improves Information Transfer in Visual Features. 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020), Vancouver, Canada.

• (with Giuseppe Marra, Matteo Tiezzi, Stefano Melacci, Marco Maggini and Marco Gori) Local Propagation in Constraint-based Neural Networks. 2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).

• (with Marco Gori and Stefano Melacci) Motion Invariance in Visual Environments. 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (2019).

See my Google Scholar profile for a full list of publications.