PROFILE
I have more than 20 years of research, industrial and teaching experience in computational engineering, uncertainty quantification, structural reliability, decision science and AI. My work develops computational and artificial intelligence frameworks for modelling complex physical and engineering systems under uncertainty.
Currently I am Senior Research Fellow at National University of Singapore (NUS), working in the area of Scientific Machine Learning, emerging field at the intersection of Scientific Computing and Machine Learning, aiming at integrating their mutual strengths.
In the period 2018-2025 I was tenured Associate Professor at Aarhus University (AU), Denmark, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering (CAE), teaching the classes of "Statistics in CAE", "Machine Learning in CAE", "Reliability, Risk and Resilience for the built environment".
I graduated as PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering, at the University of Messina, 2006, defending the thesis “Computational Methods in Structural Reliability and Stochastic Mechanics”. I was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Messina from 2006 to 2008, University of California at Berkeley from September 2008 to May 2009, National University of Singapore from 2013 to 2015, Nanyang Technological University from 2015 to 2017, and Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore from 2017 to 2018. From 2010 to 2012, I worked as a Structural Engineer in Italy, De Cola associati.
I have been involved in research projects focused on risk analysis of offshore systems, risk management of resilient transportation networks, sustainable and resilient design of smart buildings/infrastructures, predictive maintenance, autonomous systems (digital twins, drones), quantum mathematics for sustainable growth of urban ecosystems. Within these areas, I have lectured classes since 2003, and I have published over 60 papers in high-ranking scientific journals and international conference proceedings.
I have introduced the Risk Digital Twin (RDT) for design and management under uncertainty of smart buildings and infrastructures up to urban communities. The tools of the RDT are going to be deployed inside the opensource computational platform OpenAIUQ. It was conceptualized and deployed in office building at CREATE, Singapore, during the program SINgapore BERkeley Building Energy efficiency and Sustainability in the Tropics (SINBERBEST, 2015-2022), while in Aarhus I have developed the python version of OpenAIUQ.
My current research interests focus on the development of novel physically consistent AI paradigms aiming at computational sciences (e.g. mechanics of solids, fluids, quantum), autonomous systems (e.g. digital twins, drones, marine systems), sustainable growth of urban ecosystems under multi-hazard risk assessment (e.g. climate, flood, earthquake, wind), quantum mechanics , scientific discovery