MeBlog

Education and academic projects

I have a master's degree cum laude in Computer Science and Engineering from Politecnico di Milano.

I worked as a research intern in the SecLab at UC Santa Barbara, where I developed my master's thesis project: Enabling Fast Patch Propagation in Related Software Repositories. The project was later published at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020. During my master's, I also spent a semester as an exchange student at the TU Delft.

I obtained my bachelor's at the University of Parma, where I also worked as an intern at the WASNLab (now IoTLab) to develop my bachelor's thesis: a CoAP-HTTP cross-proxy for IoT scenarios.

The rest of the page outlines more details about the projects I developed throughout my university years.

Research projects

Enabling fast patch propagation in related software repositories (2017)

Novel static analysis technique to identify security-related patches on kernel code. Developed during my internship at the UC Santa Barbara SecLab in collaboration with Profs. Giovanni Vigna, Cristopher Kruegel, Aravind Machiry, and Stefano Zanero. My master's thesis was based on this project, which was also published at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020.

Ownership and defects in open source software (2016)

Data mining on open-source reporsitories to identify bug-introducing commits through novel code ownership metrics. A research project developed as part of the Mining Software Repositories class at TU Delft, in collaboration with Kaj Dreef and Prof. Alberto Bacchelli - we never submitted the work to a conference, despite initial plans to do it. For more details, refer to the paper and the source code.

Selected university projects

HTTP-CoAP protocol translation proxy (2014)

Design and development of a Java-based HTTP-CoAP cross-proxy for IoT scenarios, in collaboration with Profs. Marco Picone and Simone Cirani. The project was the outcome of my internship at the WASNLab, now IoTLab, at the University of Parma. My bachelor's thesis was based on this project. The proxy was used as part of an IoT scenario built to demonstrate the usefulness of RESTful seamless interaction between low-power and traditional devices. I presented it at the SPS IPC Drives 2014 exhibition (Parma, Italy), at the EuCNC 2014 (Bologna, Italy), and at the Internet of Things and Smart Cities Ph.D. School 2014 (Lerici, Italy).

Performing kick detection on a soccer player (2015)

Design and development of an IoT device to detect in real-time when a footballer walks, runs, or kicks the ball - a project developed as part of the Internet of Things class at TU Delft. I implemented the machine learning part of the software, using Python, and evaluated it offline on data collected from a real footballer on the field. For more details, check out the report.

Quadcopter stabilization controller (2015)

Control system for a quadcopter drone, including the communication protocol, the pc-side software, and the firmware - we implemented a feedback controller and a Kalman Filter for the stabilization. It was developed as part of the Embedded Real-Time Systems class at TU Delft. I implemented the pc-side code using C with Ncurses. For more details, check out the report and the source code.

Zoones Android app (2014)

Android app that performs location-based mode switching (e.g., silent mode to vibration mode when leaving the office). Ideated before the introduction of the same feature in the Android OS. The project was developed as part of the Mobile Apps class at the University of Parma. You can still find it on the Play Store.

Other university projects

Movies

  • Expectation vs. reality: a Qualitative Study of Movies Expectation and its Impact on Reception - a research project idea for which I wrote a draft paper (2015 - TU Delft).
  • A Movie Recommender System implemented using Java and LibFM (2014 - Politecnico di Milano) [report].

Cryptography

  • Deciphering an encrypted message using frequency analysis (2015 - TU Delft) [source code][report].
  • Analysis of an RSA multi-signature scheme (2015 - TU Delft) [report].
  • RSA implementation in Python, using the Chinese Remainder Theorem to optimize decryption (2015 - TU Delft) [source code][report].

Web science

  • Ideating novel web-related research questions - I envisioned the impact of fake news back in 2015. Read the last sections of the report for more details (2015 - TU Delft).
  • Analyzing Tweet relevance features using Python and the Twitter Streaming API (2015 - TU Delft) [source code][report].
  • Ideas about applying Web Science and Data Science techniques to human migration, personality, and epidemics (2015 - TU Delft) [report].
  • Proposal for a novel approach to re-rank tweets in the Twitter users' timeline, to show them ordered by relevance to the users' interests (2015 - TU Delft) [report].
  • Ideating research challenges related to the Semantic Web (2015 - TU Delft) [report].