Academic career

Assistant Professor (RTD-A)

Research on AI-based code generation, software reliability, and cybersecurity. Teaching programming and practical cybersecurity at undergraduate and graduate level. Supervising MSc and PhD students.

Ph.D. in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering

Thesis: "Fault Injection in Cloud Computing Systems: From Failure Mode Analysis to Runtime Failure Detection" — Advisor: Prof. Domenico Cotroneo.

Focused on fault injection, reliability analysis, and the use of probabilistic and machine learning models for anomaly detection and runtime monitoring in cloud and distributed systems.

Research Fellow (Assegnista di Ricerca)

Worked on AI-based code generation and software security: automated generation of security-relevant code, robustness of generative models, vulnerability assessment of generated code.

Visiting Researcher

Research on the application of AI-based code generation to offensive security. Collaboration continues to this day, with nine joint publications.

Scientific supervisor — Industrial PhD (PR Campania FSE+)

In collaboration with NefroCenter S.C.a.R.L. Direction of the PhD project, definition of methodology, supervision of technology-transfer activities.

Scientific supervisor — Research Fellowship

Direction and coordination of research on intrusion detection in edge and IoT environments.

Co-scientific lead — DIETI × MBDA Italia Agreement

Design and validation of AI-based pipelines for automatic VHDL firmware generation from natural language. Resulting prototype received the 1-Star MBDA Innovation Award 2026.

Task leader — PRIN 2022 FLEGREA

Leader of Work Package 1 — "Methodology and Architecture for Continuous APT Attack Modeling and Generation."

PRIN 2022 — FLEGREA

Research unit member. Built a pipeline for automated APT generation and experimental infrastructure for evaluating cloud-platform robustness.

GENIO — Edge Cloud Platform (MIMIT)

Design of software components for distributed-node management and performance monitoring in edge environments.

H2020 uDevOps

Methodologies and tools for Software Quality Assurance in microservice environments. Automated vulnerability analysis and fault injection in cloud-native infrastructures.

OSTAGE — Offensive Security via Machine Translation

NMT-based methods to generate exploits from natural-language descriptions. Designed the generation pipeline and prototyped a system for payload and shellcode generation.

BOTITS — Boosting OT and IT Security

Runtime verification techniques for monitoring cloud security. Prototype of a runtime-monitoring system for multi-tenant OpenStack environments.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

AI-based generation of software exploits and related topics, together with Prof. Domenico Cotroneo. Nine joint publications, including IEEE Security & Privacy, JSS, EMSE, AUSE, and ISSRE.

Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Lugano

LLMs for software engineering, with focus on security and quality of AI-generated code. Two joint publications.

University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia

Vulnerability detection in LLM-generated code combining static analysis and AI-based methods. Joint IEEE TSE publication.

University of Coimbra, Portugal

Security of LLM-generated code, code-injection vulnerabilities, automated detection of insecure AI-generated code.

1-Star MBDA Innovation Award

For the Artificial Firmware Designer Assistant project, on generative models for firmware design in industrial high-criticality contexts.

Invited Member — IFIP WG 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance

Invited to three consecutive meetings (USA 2024, Australia 2024, Brazil 2025) based on scientific contributions to dependability and software reliability.

Artifact Evaluation Badges (Available & Reusable) — ESEC/FSE 2019

Official ACM/IEEE recognition for the reproducibility and reusability of the artifact accompanying "How Bad Can a Bug Get? An Empirical Analysis of Software Failures in the OpenStack Cloud Computing Platform."