Hi!
after six enjoyable years spent in New York City, first at the
Computer Science Department of New York University,
then at AT&T Labs, and lastly at
Bell-Labs
as member of the Secure System Research Department, I am back in Italy...
and back to school as well! I am working towards my Ph.D. at the
Computer Science Department of University
of Pisa, and am part of the
Wireless Group and Mobile Computing. Recently, I have discussed my preliminary thesis
proposal titled "Efficiency and Byzaantine-tolerance: reconcilable aspects of the same
coin?" My thesis advisor is
Maurizio Bonuccelli.
My research interests focus mainly on Byzantine-tolerance and distributed
computing in semi-dynamic systems.
In particular, I am interested in the efficiency and scalability
issues of fault-tolerant distributed primitives, including randomized approaches and
quorum system techniques.
Blending theory and
practice motivated me to switch to Computer Science after my MS in Math, and
this interest is still strong.
I find very interesting the interaction among different research areas, and feel that
having worked as a software engineer was a useful experience for me to get a grip with the real world, and
to find out what I like best! :-)
Relevant projects I have worked on:
My Master thesis in Math was on Automatic Theorem Proving, and I continued working on this area also after my graduation and at NYU with Professor Chee Yap, with particular emphasis on Elementary Geometry and randomized approaches. This yielded to the first practical polynomial-time probabilistic method to verify the correctness of a geometric conjecture, and to a generalization of the Schwartz randomized zero-test to radical expressions (see the Prover ). I am author of the Prover, a system for the automatic verification of conjectures in elementary real geometry, which is distributed within the Core library , a library designed for the exact computation. .
At Bell Labs, I have worked with Mike Reiter and Dahlia Malkhi on the Fleet system, a middleware implementing a distributed data repository for persistent objects based on Byzantine quorum system techniques. Fleet is particularly targeted for critical applications that must stay always available and involving large populations.
Last modified June 2004.