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Education and academic projects

I received my master's degree cum laude in Computer Science and Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2017, with an Erasmus semester at TU Delft in 2015.

In 2016 I worked as a research intern at 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.

In those years I also played security CTFs, first with Tower of Hanoi, then with Shellphish, up to the DEF CON 24 CTF finals in Las Vegas.

I did my bachelor's at the University of Parma, where I interned at the WASNLab (now IoTLab) for my bachelor's thesis: a CoAP-HTTP cross-proxy for IoT scenarios.

Below, more detail on the projects I worked on at university.

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 repositories 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).

Movement detection for 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.

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

  • Research questions on the web, including the spread of fake news (2015 - TU Delft) [report].
  • 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].