Employment History

Nov 2003 to date: Engineering, project leadership and administration at ACS – IT

• European Space Agency (ESA) USNG Prototype: design, development, validation of the on-line data mining component for ESA’s next generation user services including GPU-based image analysis, OpenCV/OTB/R, spatial relational and object-oriented DB integration, query stream processing approaches

• ACS VISTO: Histopathology validation via Content-Based Image Retrieval, project management and technical leadership: large-scale biomedical image analysis via segmentation and geometrical reasoning

• ESA Knowledge centric Earth Observation / Image Information Mining for Time Series (1.6MEur budget, 9 partners in 7 EU countries): system engineering, development lead + management assistance - introduction of data mining services for the analysis and content-based retrieval of Earth Observation Satellite Image Time Series stacks – consortium of five multi-national institutional users and a team of 8 technical partners including CNES, German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt DLR), Paris Institute of Technology GET/Telecom Paris, European Commission Joint Research Center (JRC) and a number of medium/small European companies. In particular: definition, development, validation of the temporal evolution decomposition and analysis processing chains, Orfeo ToolBox integration

• ASI / CONAE SIASGE X+L: definition, design / development of value-added product processors

• ESA KEO Knowledge centric Earth Observation: implementation of prototypes for automatic feature extraction and for the extraction, after assisted learning of information and knowledge from EO data, also through data fusion, and for related classification, search, retrieval and distribution tools for user friendly access 

• EU FP7 Teleios: Virtual Observatory Infrastructure for Earth Observation Data - KEO infrastructure integration of query stream processing and semantic spatio/temporal reasoning in column-based DBs 

• ESA MDPS Multi-mission Data Processing System re-engineering: infrastructure design and implementation adopting agile SW development practices on about 20 fully operational installations in client-operated receiving stations worldwide

• ESA HARM Historical Archives Rationalization and Management: design and development of data annotation software

• ESA KEI Knowledge-based Extensions and Innovations - technical and scientific advising authority

• ACS Detection and Analysis of Radar Targets – design and development of a system for the semi-automatic interpretation of metric and sub-metric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in urban environments – engaged as the technical leader – introduction and implementation of agile SW development methodologies

• ACS FIDE - design and development of biomedical image analysis software for early melanoma diagnosis assistance - project of the year

• ESA TIGER Wade - design and development of operational, fully automated image analysis software for land analysis / transient water body mapping applications in arid African countries for local basin authorities-operated system

• ASI Italian Space Agency COSMO-SkyMed - development of operational radar processing and quality control software

• ACS LIVIA - design and development of biomedical image analysis software for ophthalmologic applications - “Exemplar Project” recognition from Italian Ministry of University and Research

• ESA KIM-V Knowledge-driven Information Mining Validation: large-scale validation of classification and content-based retrieval of EO images both with respect to user groups and to quantitative evaluations

• teaching and supervision of master-degree students during company internship activities

2004 – 2007 Lecturer at University of Camerino / INRCA Ancona – IT

• “Probabilistic image analysis” laboratory and “Image analysis in biomedical research” lecturer at the “Biomedical imagery processing and analysis” master courses

Nov 2000 - Nov 2003 Consultant for ACS - IT

• ASI COHER - study, design, implementation and deployment of a fast coherence estimator for extended sets of level-0 images currently in operation as a data evaluation and access facility at the ESA Italian Processing and Archival Facility 

Nov 2000 – Nov 2003 Researcher at Deutsches zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt / German Aerospace Center – DE

• ESA Knowledge-driven Information Mining (KIM): investigation of the use of application-independent image content descriptors as indices for classification and support to query formulation towards large EO image archives – with Polytechnic of Zurich ETHZ, Switzerland and ACS Rome

• DLR TERRASAR-X data mining ground segment branch preparation - requirement formulation, Python/C++ object oriented design and operational implementation of high resolution information extraction algorithms

Nov 1998 – Nov 2000 System Analyst at ACS – IT

• NASA/DLR/ASI Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission – design and implementation of a section of the ASI/Telespazio processor 

• ESA project on the handling of the expected performance degradation of the ERS-2 satellite on-board gyros

• Infostrada, Ericsson project on rapid land cover / microwave signal dumping maps from satellite radar sensor data.

Education

Mar 2005 PhD cum Laude  Elektrotechnik und Informatik - Universität Siegen, DE

 with a thesis on “Hierarchical Bayesian analysis of high complexity data for the inversion of metric InSAR in urban environments”

Nov 1998 Laurea degree  in Physics with 107/110 exit mark - Università di Bari, IT

 with a thesis on “Teoria ed applicazioni dell'interferometria SAR differenziale” (Theory and applications of differential SAR interferometry) 

1992 Maturità classica - A level education - Liceo classico statale “Socrate” Bari, IT with 60/60 exit mark

Review and steering responsibilities, professional organizations, research publications

• Scientific reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE Letters on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. Evaluator of projects for the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belgian Government) in the framework of the Belgian ORFEO effort; Technical session conference chair/co-chair, member of IEEE Signal Processing, Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Aerospace and Electronic Systems, Antennas and Propagation Societies.