Currently, puzzles are my main research interest. I'm working on two different fields: that of automatic heuristic learning (for Problem Solving) and that of human-like crossword solving. The first activity comprehends the analysis and the definition of a new admissibility criterion (likely-admissible heuristics), the generation of heuristics through machine learning techniques (ANN), their parallel application to puzzles in order to reach high degrees of admissibility and the design of heuristic oriented training algorithms (based on back error propagation). The crossword solving project (WebCrow) is a recent study that has almost no literature and that I believe to be very promising being this a true AI-complete problem. In the WebCrow project we introduce the idea that the problem of producing semantically solid reasoning (alike Question Answering) can be faced using the Web as a knowledge base.

AI & Games

"AI & Games: Should Computational Psychology be Revalued?" Topoi, Sep. 2005 [PAPER]

Learning heuristics for problem solving

"Conoscenza Euristica: tecniche simboliche e subsimboliche". Tesi di Laurea: Universita' degli Studi di Siena, 14/02/2003
Relatore: Prof. Marco Gori, Controrelatore: Prof. Cristiano Castelfranchi. [THESIS] [ABSTRACT]
"Joining symbolic and sub-symbolic sources for p-admissible non-memory-based heuristics " AI*IA Notizie (now Intelligenza Artificiale), Sep. 2003 [PAPER]
"Likely-admissible and sub-symbolic heurisitcs" European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-04), Aug. 2004 [PAPER]

Crossword solving

"WebCrow: a WEB-based system for CROssWord solving" American Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), Jul. 2005 [PAPER]
"Solving Italian crosswords using the Web" Italian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA-05), Sep. 2005 [PAPER]
"WebCrow: a web-based crossword solver " Intelligent Technologies for Iteractive Entertainment Conference (INTETAIN-2005) , Dec. 2005 [PAPER]
"Cracking Crosswords: the Computer Challenge " Reasoning, Action and Interaction in AI Theories and Systems , 2006

Text Mining and Natural Language Processing

"Adaptive Context-based term (re)weighting. An experiment on Single-Word Question Answering. " European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-06), Aug. 2006 [PAPER]
"Automatic term categorization by extracting knowledge from the Web. " European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-06), Aug. 2006 [PAPER]
"Semantic labeling of data by using the Web " Web Intelligence Conference (WIC-06), Dec. 2006 [PAPER]
"An adaptive Context-based algorithm for Term Weighting. " International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07) , Jan. 2007 [PAPER]

Non academic expierences:
- 8 months internship with Ciaolab S.p.A (Milano): design and implementation of an automotive-alarm system prototype.
- Web designing free-lance (working both with private and public entities).
- Collaboration with Società Autostrade for the implementation of a system that improves the automatic reading of car-registrations.