Short Bio

Physicist and scientific software developer interested in artificial intelligence applied to geoscience and remote sensing.

Long Bio

I work as a scientific software engineer at my own company datiaperti based in Rome, Italy. Before taking the leap from being an employee to being self-employed, I worked as a software engineer in many public and private organizations in Italy, Switzerland and Germany. In Germany I worked at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems in EU and German funded research projects and industry research projects related to Semantic Web, Machine Learning and Big Data technologies. In Switzerland, I worked as a research associate and software engineer in two FP7 research projects about data integration using Semantic Web technologies at the E-Government Institute of the Bern University of Applied Sciences. Before moving abroad I worked in Italy as a consultant in software development projects at various multinational companies such as Ericsson, Marconi Communications, Accenture, and Italian government institutions. I hold an M.Sc. in Physics from the Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on Atmospheric Physics and Laser Radar Remote Sensing under the supervision of Prof. Giorgio Fiocco. I have co-authored papers on Semantic Web, E-Government and Remote Sensing. My main interests are artificial intelligence, algorithms, computer vision, earth observation and remote sensing, open source software development and open data.

Work experience

2023-06-01 - Present: Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research, Italy

Research grant for the development of machine learning models of climate and atmospheric processes in the arctic region under the supervision of Dr. Antonello Pasini of the Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research of the Italian National Research Council. The research grant is partly funded by the European Commission for the Artic Passion project.

2022-12-19 - Present: Joint Research Center, Italy

Deep Learning and Image Processing Expert at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission for the development of methods to infer rooftop types from very high resolution satellite imagery.

2019-12-01 - Present: datiaperti

I started my free-lance career as a scientific software developer. I eventually became aware that I can manage myself much better than other people can. This will certainly save me time and will allow me to focus on things that matters. I built my personal website and that of my future company datiaperti. I work on personal projects about geospatial data science, computer vision, machine learning, or on paid projects on behalf of research institutions and private organizations.

2015-12-01 – 2019-11-30: Fraunhofer Institut für Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme, Germany

I worked as project leader and software architect at the Fraunhofer Institut für Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme in EU and German research projects and industry projects based on Big Data, Semantic Technology and Machine Learning. As a software architect I designed the architecture of the Smart, Green and Integrated Transport pilot for the Big Data Europe H2020 project using open source frameworks such as Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and Elasticsearch. I also acquired experience in using Docker containers for deployment. I led an industry project on behalf of a Spanish customer for the development and deployment of the back-end system of their online e-commerce platform of electronic components for space missions. The platform was based on distributed components for indexing and storage and additional services. I also developed the recommender system of the platform based on a collaborative filtering algorithm. As a project leader I applied agile methodologies in both research and industry projects for project planning and management, cost estimation, development, and continuous integration.

2012-09-01 - 2015-10-31: E-Government Institute of the Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland

I was involved in two European FP7 projects both led by the Bern University of Applied Sciences. In the first project, Fusepool, I developed Java OSGi components for the transformation of XML or tabular data into RDF and for the disambiguation and interlinking of entities. The second project Fusepool P3 was aimed at providing components to implement workflows for Linked Data Platforms. I participated in the writing of the proposal and in the development of the software. Each platform components could communicate with others through a REST interface. My work was focused on interlinking, based on the Silk framework and in the use of geographical data. I developed also a semantic web application to visualize geographical data from a Linked Data Platform and search points of interest in a map. In both projects I participated in the writing of deliverables and published papers as author or co-author in peer-reviewed journals.

2011-03-01 - 2011-08-31: University of Trento Dept. of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Italy

I received a scholarship for a research study on data integration at the entity level through heterogeneous systems from the University of Trento.

2011-01-01 - 2012-07-31: Okkam S.r.l., Italy

I designed the architecture and wrote the project proposal of a software system for the integration of datasets related to real estate properties for a number of municipalities in the Autonomous Province of Trento. The data was used to build a knowledge base to calculate tax revenues according to the province’s policy. The project consisted in the development of some ontologies for the representation of the domain objects, the mapping system from the original data format to the semantic one, and of the components to search and query the knowledge base.

1999 - 2010: Sistemi Informativi Avanzati S.r.l, Italy

I worked as an IT consultant, on behalf of a small IT company in Rome, at various large companies and Italian and international organizations such as Ericsson Telecomunicazioni S.p.A, Selex Communications S.p.A., Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Accenture, Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza e assistenza per i Dipendenti dell’Amministrazione Pubblica (INPDAP).

Publications

  • L. Selmi - Flood mapping using the Sentinel-1 imagery and the ESA SNAP S1 Toolbox, 2021, ESA SNAP Tutorials (link)
  • Josep Maria Salanova Grau, Evangelos Mitsakis, Panagiotis Tzenos, Iraklis Stamos, Luigi Selmi, Georgia Aifadopoulou - Multisource Data Framework for Road Traffic State Estimation, Journal of Advanced Transportation, Hindawi (link)
  • Ivan Ermilov, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Aad Versteden, Hajira Jabeen, Gezim Sejdiu, Giorgos Argyriou, Luigi Selmi, Jürgen Jakobitsch, Jens Lehmann - Managing Lifecycle of Big Data Applications, International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web, Springer (link)
  • L. Selmi, A. Neuroni - Fusepool P3: A Linked Data Platform for Open Government Data, IOS Press (link)
  • M. Kaschesky, L. Selmi - Fusepool R5 linked data framework: concepts, methodologies, and tools for linked data, Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (link)
  • P. Castracane, L. Selmi, S. Casadio, M. Cacciani and G. Fiocco - Ground-based remote sensing of wind, temperature and aerosol backscattering in an urban environment during different atmospheric stability conditions, Ed. Physics and chemistry of the earth. Part B: Hydrology, oceans and atmosphere, Elsevier Science (link)

Presentations and awards

Courses and Certifications

  • 2023-03-22 The Mediterranean System: a hotspot for climate change and adaptation, Accademia dei Lincei, Rome (Certificate of Attendance)
  • 2022-09-21 Monitoring and Modeling Floods using Earth Observations, NASA Applied Remote Sensing Training Program
  • 2022-09-20 Selecting Climate Change Projection Sets for Mitigation, Adaptation and Risk Management Applications, NASA Applied Remote Sensing Training Program
  • 2021-12-05 ESRI - Spatial Data Science: The New Frontier in Analytics
  • 2021-11-19 ESRI - Imagery in Action
  • 2021-09-14 - Echoes in Space - Introduction to Radar Remote Sensing, EO College
  • 16-20 November 2020 - 2nd Joint Training Course on Atmospheric Composition, EUMETSAT, ESA, ECMWF
  • 2021-06-30 Using Google Earth Engine for Land Monitoring Applications, NASA Applied Remote Sensing Training Program
  • 2020-08-10 Algorithms, Part 1. First part of the course taught by Kevin Wayne and Robert Sedgewick and offered by Princeton University on Coursera. This part of the course covers elementary data structures, sorting, and searching algorithms in Java.
  • 2020-05-27 Statistical Learning An introductory-level course in supervised learning, with a focus on regression and classification methods. The lectures cover all the material in An Introduction to Statistical Learning, with Applications in R by James, Witten, Hastie and Tibshirani.
  • 2020-03-09 Algorithms, Part 2. Second part of the course taught by Kevin Wayne and Robert Sedgewick and offered by Princeton University on Coursera. This part of the course focuses on graph and string-processing algorithms in Java.
  • 2019-10-15 ESRI - Going Places with Spatial Analysis
  • 2019-07-12 Cryptography I. An online course about symmetric and public-key cryptography taught by Prof. Dan Boneh and offered by Stanford University on the Coursera platform. I achieved a grade of 100 %.
  • 2018-07-22 - Deep Learning Specialization. An online specialization on Deep Learning offered by deeplearning.ai on the Coursera platform and taught by Prof. Andrew Ng. The course, with examples and tests in Python, is made up of five courses: 1) Neural Networks and Deep Learning, 2) Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization and Optimization, 3) Structuring Machine Learning Projects, 4) Convolutional Neural Networks, 5) Sequence Models. I achieved a grade of 100 % in all the five courses.
  • 2017-02-18 Project Management (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) An online course offered by the University of California, Irvine, on the Coursera platform and taught by Margaret Meloni, MBA, PMP. The course provides a broad introduction to project planning, risk management, budgeting, and scheduling.
  • 2016-10-30 Machine Learning. An online course offered by Stanford University on the Coursera platform and taught by Prof. Andrew Ng. The course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, data mining, and statistical pattern recognition with examples and tests in Matlab. Topics include: (i) Supervised learning, parametric and non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks, (ii) unsupervised learning, clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning, (iii) best practices in machine learning, bias/variance tradeoff, innovation process in machine learning and artificial intelligence. I achieved a grade of 98.8 %.
  • 2016-07-15 2nd International ScaDS Summer School on Big Data 2016, Universität Leipzig, Germany. The summer school provided overviews as well as deep dive coding sessions about Big Data storage, Distributed Stream Data Processing, Graph Analytics, Big Data Integration. (Certificate of Attendance)
  • 2014-12-22 Introduction to Logic. An online course offered by Stanford University and taught by Prof. M. Genesereth. The course is a rigorous introduction to Logic. It covers the encoding of information as logical sentences, logical reasoning, and an introduction to logic technology and its applications. Logics covered include Propositional Logic and Relational Logic. I completed the course with distinction.
  • 2012-07-20 First Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis, International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA), University of Trento (Certificate of Attendance)
  • 2012-07-14 9th Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web, Cercedilla, Spain (Certificate of Attendance)
  • 2012-05-26 2nd European Semantic Web Conference Summer School 2012, Kalamaki, Crete, Greece (Certificate of Attendance)
  • 2010-05-14 Semantic Technology Specialist Course - STI International, Vienna, Austria (Certificate of Attendance)
  • 2006-04-06 Sun Microsystems Certified Programmer for the Java Platform 1.4 (link)

Languages

Italian is my mother tongue. I speak English fluently as it’s the language I use the most since 2010. I can understand quite a bit of German, French and Portuguese. I got a Cambridge First Certificate English (Level B2 of the EU Reference for Languages) in 2010, and a telc Zertifikat Deutsch B1 in 2017.

Other skills

I am the founder and one of the organizers of the PyData Rome Meetup group, the Rome chapter of PyData, a community for developers and users of open source data tools and open data. When I am not at work I like being in the nature, most often in the Apennine Mountains in Central Italy, not far from Rome. I have a 1° degree FIPSAS/CMAS diver license and I have been practicing mountain climbing and skiing.