Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Luca is a critical thinker, enthusiastic about new experiences and challenges. Has lived in several different countries for extended periods of time, including Italy, USA (where he graduated from high-school), France, UK and Canada, where he currently resides. Speaks fluently italian, English and French and can engage in discussions in Spanish. Has a passion for science in general, and computer science in particular, with a PhD and 10 years of experience in the field, employed by several world-known universities. He recently transitioned to a new exciting career in the private sector, where he has been able to wear many hats, with tasks ranging from SOFTWARE ENGINEERING to CLOUD SERVICES INTEGRATION, to DATA ANALYSIS. His long term goal is to further enhance his programming skills and to grow professionally in the industry. CORE QUALIFICATIONS Knowledgeable programmer - for many years, has 'played' with several programming styles (imperative, OO, functional, concurrent, typed, untyped). Skilled at framing a problem within the proper context, and at quickly reaching its solution - has published a number of papers. Deeply confident and maturely crafted at expressing technical concepts, both in oral and written communication - has presented at several conferences and workshops; has taught military cadets, computer science and other students. Experienced team-player - been part of different research and work groups throughout his career; organized the "Mobility Reading Group" at Imperial College, for over a year.
Led a team of Data Engineering trainers from all regions on improving and maintaining the learning material for all Data Engineering and Python modules Spearheaded a trainee project named WiseQuery, which: - integrates several interactions with a Large Language Model, via API calls, within an automated data pipeline - includes the development of a "unit testing framework" for the prompts in the pipeline - gained considerable interest from clients who, at the time (Fall 2023), were still unsure about how to take full advantage of recent advances in AI - gained interest from within the company, which led to the project being replicated in other regions - led to subsequent projects, including POCs requested by and tailored to specific clients, with the potential of opening a new line of business for the company - exposed trainees to prompt engineering tools and techniques Has been a part of the Program Advisory Committee on Big Data at Queen's College of Business, Lambton College in Mississauga: - the PAC includes other industry experts and aims to provide guidance on the development of the curriculum
Taught databases and sql. Prepared material, organized labs, corrected assignments, midterms and finals
Contributed to the research, implementation and testing of a brand new suite of predictive analytics solutions (R, SQL, regression and segmentation analysis) Developed key functionalities for the Product Recommendation Engine (Python and Java). Aided the company to meet targets, by upgrading the BI database as required (SQL). Aided the company to keep high standards of reliability, by ensuring data quality and consistency at all times (SQL). Worked in an Agile environment, as a member of a Scrum team.
- Performed research on the foundations of imperative languages, as a postdoctoral fellow - Designed a model of differential privacy, allowing improved automated verification techniques to be applied - Assisted in the teaching of Ruby and Ruby on Rails
Kickstarted the data engineering stream company-wide Taught courses in: - Big data (Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Pig) - Software development (Java, Python, Scala), including data access and client/server architectures - Unix scripting - Relational databases (Oracle SQL) - Data Analysis (R, numpy/pandas/matplotlib Python libraries) Created learning material on: - Big data infrastructures and processes - Machine learning (data preparation, training and testing phases; various classes of models, both supervised and unsupervised) - Functional programming in Scala Led initiatives such as the Friday Free Forum to encourage dialogue on social issues during the early days of the pandemic
- Performed research on routing protocols, as a postdoctoral fellow - Applied mathematical structures (such as variants of semirings) to obtain precise mathematical characterizations of existing routing protocols - Proposed changes to such structures to fine-tune the design of new protocols, in order to meet better optimality conditions - Delved into the complexity of real-life routing protocols (TCP/IP, UDP), to bridge the gap between theory and practice - Started the implementation of the improved protocol (C++ and OCaml; Perl to parse JSON packages)