About
Born in Catania (Italy) in 1969, got a master degree in Computer Science in 1999. Since the degree he worked as researcher in the field of computer vision and augmented reality for the University of Catania. Then he started to work in the Telecommunication industry from 2000 till 2005 for the billing sector. Since 2006 has been employed with a contract based relationship, at the Institute of Nuclear Physics Dept. of Catania as Technologist, participating to several European projects starting from the 6th Framework Programe till the latest H2020 of the European Commission. From 2018 he got a permanent position at INFN providing support to the scientific calculation and their related distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs).
Experiences
Operating systems, software development especially C/C++ and Assembler applied in the context of the computer graphics, have been since ever the core of his interests. His thesis work: “Augmented Reality: An implementation without calibration on low cost machines” has been continued for almost one year while working as researcher for the University of Catania. In that period he learned methods and algorithms for fast computing calculation, real-time image acquisition, 2D/3D computer graphics, computer vision and augmented reality.
When joined the mobile telecommunication indistry for the billing sector, he learned the BSCS system, knew the fundamentals of the mobile networks, improved his knowledge with commercial Unix environments Compaq/HP and IBM, shell programming (ksh), Oracle databases, SQL, C/C++, Software maintenance tools (CMVC), Centura for BSCS’ GUIs on MS Windows.
Coming back to the research environment, he joined the world of distributed computing infrastructures in the form of Grid Computing in particular in the context of the Europan Grid Infrastructure (EGI). The Grid infrastructure was using the EMI/gLite middleware principally made of open source products operating under Enterprise Linux OSes (Scientific Linux). During the participation of the european projects, almost all of them foreseen a training activity in using and instaling the Grid Middleware and providing user support for running scientific applications on the Grid. This kind of activity involved a wide knowledge of different software environments, interpreters, database engines etc. Key environments for those European projects were the EGEE and later the EGI intitiatives, both requesting specific knowledge of their internal services and procedures to maintain their own operations. Most recently, European projects like INDIGO-datacloud and EOSC-hub moved their focus from the Grid to other forms of distributed infrastructures based on the most popular Cloud environments. These platforms are mainly managed by OpenStack (much less OpenNebula), plus a set of other specific services to maintain the operations. From this period he also focused in the area of the Science Gateways, in particular, designing and implementing the FutureGateway Framework a software initiative aiming to fastly and securely develop community oriented Science Gateways. By this experience he moved professionally more close to the software architecture/development, practiced with open software repositories (GitHub) and learned modern software development strategies like Agile and CI/CD solutions. He also integrated Science Gateways with the Open Access Repositories as key tool for the reproducibility in Open Science, one of the aspects of the FAIR data.
European projects
Below the list of the european projects where he was involved: