Research Interests
I am a researcher at Microsoft Research. My research focuses on augmenting data management systems to support business analytics, with emphasis on data-driven predictive and prescriptive analytics.
The ultimate goal of my research is to democratize decision making in a variety of fundamental applications and disciplines, such as financial planning, meal planning, robotics, fair machine learning, text summarization, information retrieval, and systems.
Education
In my Ph.D. dissertation, I built a complete and efficient data management system (PackageBuilder) able to support a broad class of decision-making problems that can be expressed as integer linear programs (ILP), on both certain and uncertain data. My work has been recognized by several ACM awards.
I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I collaborated with members of the DREAM Lab, and the Human Data (HuDa) Interaction Lab from NYU Abu Dhabi. I received my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Bologna, Italy.
During summer 2017, I interned at Microsoft Research, in the Data Systems Group (formerly DMX). During summer 2016, I interned at IBM Watson. During spring 2016, I visited NYU Abu Dhabi, UAE. During summer 2015, I visited the AMPLab at the University of California, Berkeley. During my Master's studies, I visited the Data-Intensive Systems group at Aarhus University, Denmark. During my Bachelor's studies, I interned in the Database Lab at the University of California, Riverside.
Videos
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VLDB 2020 Best Demonstration Award:
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SIGMOD 2020 Technical Paper Presentation:
Projects
Publications
- Wred: Workload Reduction for Scalable Index Tuning
- Scaling Package Queries to a Billion Tuples via Hierarchical Partitioning and Customized Optimization
- Ranking Models for the Temporal Dimension of Text
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SubSumE: A Dataset for Subjective Summary Extraction from Wikipedia Documents
NewSum at EMNLP 2021 (workshop)
- Solving Markov Decision Processes with Partial State Abstractions
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sPaQLTooLs: A Stochastic Package Query Interface for Scalable Constrained Optimization
VLDB 2020 (demo)
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SuDocu: Summarizing Documents by Example
VLDB 2020 (demo)
- Stochastic Package Queries in Probabilistic Databases
- Scalable Computation of High-Order Optimization Queries
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Package queries: efficient and scalable computation of high-order constraints
VLDBJ 2018 (Special Issue on Best Papers of VDLB 2016)
- A Scalable Execution Engine for Package Queries
- Redistributing Funds across Charitable Crowdfunding Campaigns
- Scalable Package Queries in Relational Database Systems
- Improving Package Recommendations through Query Relaxation
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PackageBuilder: From Tuples to Packages
VLDB 2014 (demo)
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PackageBuilder: Querying for packages of Tuples
SIGMOD 2014 (poster)
- Metric Spaces for Temporal Information Retrieval
- Recognising and Interpreting Named Temporal Expressions
Service
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Program Committee
- SIGMOD 2025
- VLDB 2025
- DataPlat Workshop @ ICDE 2024
- TKDE 2020
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Guest Editorial Board
- Information Processing and Management, special issue on Time and Information Retrieval, 2014/2015
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External Review Committee
- VLDB 2017
- SIGMOD 2015
- VLDB 2015
- RANLP 2013