I am a Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Rome since September 2025, focusing on AI-driven scientific discovery.
I am affiliated with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) since March 2026.
I am also Co-Founder at Samaya AI from 2022, building an AI-powered knowledge-discovery platform.
From 2018 to 2022, I was a Researcher at the FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team of Meta AI (formerly known as Facebook AI Research), where I focused on Knowledge-Intensive Natural Language Processing.
Before that, I was a Research Scientist at the R&D department at Thomson Reuters and a Data Engineer at KMPG.
I obtained my PhD from Sapienza University where I was part of the Research Center on Cyber Intelligence and Information Security. My thesis advisor was Prof. Leonardo Querzoni.
During my PhD I've been a Visiting Researcher at the University of Mannheim in the Data and Web Science Group under the supervision of Prof. Rainer Gemulla.
Invited talks:
- Panelist at ROMA.AI (September 2025), on Generative AI: “Allucinazioni, Legge di scala, Small Language models: limiti ed opportunità per l’AI generativa e l’Agentic AI”
- Keynote talk at Eval4RAG: Workshop on Evaluation of RAG Systems at ECIR 2025 (April 2025) on "A Journey Through Domain-Specific RAG and Agent Evaluation"
- Invited talk at Sapienza DIAG Seminar Series (October 2024), title: “Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Applications, Limitations, and Future Directions”
- Invited keynote at the KBC-LM workshop @ ISWC (November 2023), title: “Can machines assist humans in discovering new knowledge?"
- Panelist at the Italian Tech Week 2023 (September 2023) on a “new generation of Italian entrepreneurs”
- Panelist at the Workshop on Generative Information Retrieval @SIGIR23 (July 2023) on “Model Behavior”
- Invited talk at the London Information Retrieval Meetup (June 2023), title: “Autoregressive Knowledge Retrieval”
- Invited talk at the Edinburgh ILCC Seminar Series (April 2023), title: “Autoregressive Knowledge Retrieval”
- Invited talk at London AI (November 2022), title: “Improve Wikipedia Verifiability with AI”
- Invited talk at NL4AI (November 2022), title: “Improve Wikipedia Verifiability with AI”
- Invited talk at DeepMind (November 2022), title: “Autoregressive Knowledge Retrieval”
- digitaltrends interview (August 2022)
- PointerPodcast interview (in Italian, August 2022)
- Il Messaggero interview (in Italian, July 2022)
- Invited talk at UCL AI Society Journal Club (18 January 2022), title: “Verifying Citations with Context-Aware Natural Language Processing”
- Invited talk at AI Ukraine (30 October 2021), title: “What do machines know?”
- Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing lesson for the Data Mining Technology for Business and Society course of Prof. Stefano Leonardi at Sapienza, University of Rome (15 May 2021)
- Invited talk at JEEC|21 (19 March 2021), title: “What do machines know?”
- Invited talk at Stanford MLSys Seminar Series (11 March 2021), title: “Assessing Machine Knowledge”
- Panelist at the Knowledge Connexions Conference on AI + Knowledge - a match made in heaven? (30 November 2020)
- Invited talk at Unstructured and Structured KBs workshop (25 June 2020), title: “How can we compare unstructured, structured and self-structured knowledge representation?”
- Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing lesson for the Data Mining Technology for Business and Society course of Prof. Stefano Leonardi at Sapienza, University of Rome (14 May 2020)
Awards:
- Best Poster in the NeurIPS 2021 ENLSP Workshop for "Cutting Down on Prompts and Parameters: Simple Few-Shot Learning with Language Models"
- 1st place at the NeurIPS Efficient Open-Domain Question Answering competition 2020 for the 6GB constrained track and unconstrained track
- Google Best Paper Award at AKBC 2020 for "How Context Affects Language Models' Factual Predictions"
- Best Paper Award Runner Up at DIMWA 2019 for "SAFE: Self-attentive function embeddings for binary similarity"
- Research grant for the "Avvio alla Ricerca" (research launch) project from Sapienza (2015), title "SARE: Scalable Algorithms for Relation Extraction with contextual data"
- Finalist at the Telecom Italia Big Data Challenge 2014. A. Anagnostopoulos, F. Petroni, M. Sorella: “COLITA: Collaborative Interest-driven Targeted Advertising”
- Enrolled in the "percorso d'eccellenza" (excellence path program) for MSc. in Computer Engineering: special program for top 10th students in the MSc, a.y. 2011/2012
- Award "laureato eccellente Sapienza" (excellent graduate Sapienza), a.y. 2011/2012
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