About me.

The short version

Background.

I’m Stefano, an Italian computer scientist and researcher currently living in Munich. I grew up in Sondrio, a small town in the Italian Alps, and studied computer science in Verona, Italy, before moving to Lugano, Switzerland, to study artificial intelligence at USI.

While at USI, I met my current PhD supervisor, Andrea Stocco, at Formula USI, a hackathon he organized around the Donkey Car platform. That little car ended up being more important than I expected. When Andrea later offered a PhD position working on autonomous driving and testing, I followed him to Germany. We still use the same Donkey Car platform in our research today.

Before moving to Munich, my main project at IDSIA was my Master’s thesis on autonomous nano-drones, which I continued for another year as an intern. I worked on fitting a relative-localization neural network onto a 40-gram quadrotor, allowing it to track another drone in real time using a single onboard camera and less than 100 mW of power. The work eventually became a paper at IEEE ICRA 2023.

In 2023, I joined fortiss and the Technical University of Munich for my PhD. The robots became considerably larger. Today most of my work revolves around autonomous driving and, in particular, understanding what happens when systems tested in simulation are deployed in the real world.

That has made my PhD much more hands-on than I originally expected. Alongside experimental design and research papers, I spend a lot of time working with ROS, sensors, vehicle interfaces, computers, cables, and whatever has decided not to work that morning. I am also the technical lead for Fortuna, our full-size autonomous research vehicle.

There is probably a common thread through all of this. I like working on systems where software eventually has to interact with something physical. I’m interested in machine learning and simulation, but mostly in what happens when you actually deploy them and discover which assumptions were wrong.

Outside research, I simply enjoy playing with hardware and building things. Fortuna’s recovery started as work and gradually became a bit of a hobby. Some of the less serious things I have built around it ended up in the Just for fun section.

Growing up in the Alps also means I have been skiing for as long as I can remember. When there is no snow, I enjoy windsurfing. I also like travelling by motorcycle with my girlfriend, Francesca. Moving to Munich gave me a sufficiently good excuse to buy a BMW GS, which has since become our preferred way of disappearing somewhere for a few days.

Current

Researcher at fortiss · Doctoral researcher at TUM

Focus

Testing and validation of autonomous systems

Methods

Simulation, mixed reality, field experiments, empirical software engineering

Platforms

Fortuna (full-size) and a small-scale Donkey Car research vehicle