Research and Work Experience
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Dept. of Computer Science, Purdue University, and I am interested in design and implementation of programming languages, in particular runtime systems, memory management and virtual machines.
You can find online my Curriculum Vitae, a list of the Research Projects I have been involved with, my Research Statement and my Teaching Statement.
I am currently conducting my research in the context of the DARPA Program Composition for Embedded System (PCES) program. In particular I am part of the S3 Lab, working on Ovm/J, an open source framework for building programming language runtime systems, and supervising graduate students. The main emphasis of Ovm is the creation of a Java virtual machine compliant with the RTSJ, the Real-Time Specification for Java.
Our research group participated in the development of the ScanEagle Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV), which received a DUKE's Choice Java Award at JavaOne in 2005. I also supervise graduate students in the department.
Previously I obtained my Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, UK, at the Dept. of Computing Science. My research explored the use of compiler-generated maps in order to support preemptive heap manipulations at any instruction for optimised native code. More details can be obtained here.
While progressing with my Ph.D., I also took part in two Internships offered by Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Mountain View, California, and I have worked as a tutor for the M.Sc. in Information Technology (teaching and marking assignments.)
Prior to my time in Scotland, where I also completed my Masters, I was a Visiting Scientist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), participating in research on high-speed cameras for biological applications (in the Fast project), both on the hardware front as well as developing applicative and low-level software.
I have also been a system manager and I have worked around networks
for quite a few years at the University
of Udine (in Italy). I regard the practical knowledge that I
acquired during that time as invaluable, and it is still useful
to me to this day. Formerly I have developed various software for a health
care charity, a city archive, and a swimming
club, and I have spent, of course, plenty of time around various
generations of computers.
I also served a year as a volunteer at the Italian
Association for the Fight Against Muscular Dystrophy.
For more detailed information, my C.V., reasonably up-to-date, is available online.
You can also find online my research statement and my teaching statement.
Please contact me if you need to know more.