Nicola is an accomplished Data Engineer with over 5 years of experience in a data-driven role including leading teams of data scientists for upday by Samsung. He has a decade of development experience in different areas, including as an expert Ruby on Rails backend developer, Python developer, and mobile development. His expertise includes understanding how the data available to the company can be leveraged for its different problems, from recommendations to advertising, through experiments, analysis, and machine learning.
Partnered closely with business and product teams to identify and prioritize the most important data projects for a fast-growing tech and media company.
Led a team of data scientists and engineers to understand/influence our data architecture, data models, instrumentation, as well as design, develop, and own data pipelines and models that power internal analytics.
Worked on a gender prediction model based on user reading habits, using Python, Scikit-learn, Pandas, pySpark, Tensorflow, etc.
Worked with the team dedicated to content delivery and real-time recommendation engine development, including backend and infrastructure development with on call duty.
Conceived and built the first recommendation system based on ElasticSearch.
Ramped up the whole backend development for the company. The user base came from all Samsung devices (as the app was pre-installed), hence an additional level of complexity was added by having a scalable architecture.
Worked on the development, maintenance, project management, and conception (UX enhancement) of the JustBook iOS App.
Designed and developed the testing layer for the APIs and part of the other modules in the backend (Factory boy).
Extended the mobile APIs. Created a solution to integrate to the current system in order to optimise the server response time and reduce the database load.
Planethours is a non-profit project which aims to provide an easy and accessible way to assess the impact of individuals on climate change to raise awareness. Planethours aims to provide an effective and comprehensive climate profiler that operates with a minimal set of information in order to maximize users' reach. The most fun (and difficult) part was to collect all the data about CO2 emissions from different papers and sources and aggregate them in a uniform way so as to be able to develop a to-the-point CO2 emission assessment tool.
The project is a framework to create decentralized treasure hunt games based on Solidity, running on Ethereum. Planetscape, a dystopian escape game for 36C3 gives a good overview of what it can be used for. I had a lot of fun working with Solidity, a new programming paradigm, with challenges that are very different from those I usually dealth with.
Heartkick is an app that generates musical playlists from your heartbeat. The most interesting part was to be able to measure the heartbeat of a person with the photo camera. We stream music from one of the most popular streaming platforms, Soundcloud, and through it you can listen to more songs than you have ever imagined.
Education
Master Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
