I'm a Post Doctoral Researcher at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), and a member of the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics (LCCD). I received a M.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the the University of Naples "Federico II". in March 2002. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the the same university in December 2005.

My primary research interests are in the area of information retrieval and information extraction, multimedia databases and knowledge and data engineering. I'm a member of the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics (LCCD).

Activity Detection
Data to be monitored might include activity at an airport or military base or another sensitive site, video streams from surveillance cameras, or logs generated by web applications or any transaction processing system (e.g., ATMs). Applications might require activity detection to be preformed either in real-time as data is being received or offline after a body of data has been acquired. Activities tend to be high-level and can often be executed in many different ways. Our research is aimed at developing techniques and algorithms to formally describe what the activities of interest are and identify instances of them from a body of data, both online and offline.

The RDF Extractor & Automatic Coding Engine
TREX is a generic, domain-independent Information Extraction system. The Automatic Coding Engine augments TREX extraction capabilities with a logic level, allowing to perform the reasoning steps needed to combine multiple facts and find answers to complex questions.