Position: researcher at the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technology - National Research Council (CNR) (2001).

EDUCATION
B.Sc. Mathematics (1995, University of Pavia, Italy. Final grade: 110/110)
Ph.D. Mathematical Statistics (2002, University of Pavia, Italy)

CURRENT RESEARCH ACTIVITY
Analysis and modelling of climatic data.
Hidden Markov Models have been applied to analyse rainfall data from two Italian areas at high hydrological risk: both rainfall occurrences in Southern Calabria Ionica (Italy) and rainfall amounts in Central-East Sardinia (Italy) have been considered.
The former analysis has been conducted in cooperation with CNR-IRPI (Cosenza). The latter analysis was part of a cooperation with the Regional Environmental Protection Agency of Sardinia aiming at modelling and analysing extreme rainfall events for the purposes of hydrological risk prevention and mitigation. In particular, by applying a hidden Markov model a complete characterization of the autumn-winter precipitations at four selected stations in Ogliastra (Sardinia) has been obtained by introducing a mixture of Weibull distributions to model daily rainfall amounts, so that the occurrence and intensity of extreme events could be captured. It has been shown that the obtained fit improve the one provided by more common distributions, so that the estimated model is also able to provide realistic simulations. Extreme events have been studied from the point of view of of climate change: trends in extreme events have been studied and Extreme Value Analysis and Regional Frequency Analysis has been carried out to highlight the hydrogeological risk due to heavy rainfall and determine the return time for the most intense and very recent extreme events occurred in Ogliastra. The work has been extended to all the island. This research activity is complementary to studies about geomorphic changes caused by flash floods conducted in cooperation with the University of Bologna. Finally, climate analysis has been extended to temperatures, and Liguria Region has been included in the study area to analyse forest fire static risk (2004-2013)
The Urban Heat Island phenomenon in Milan is under study, in cooperationwith CNR-ITIA (S. Giuliano Milanese, Italy).

Applications in Ecology
In cooperation with the Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria (Italy), the University of Brescia (Italy) and the Institute of Agricultural Entomology - University of Milan (Italy) a new approach to deal with ranking of predefined ecosystem management options has been proposed. The approach, based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, has been firstly applied to the evaluation of intervention strategies proposed by the Cantonal authorities and aiming at the conservation of amphibians in the alpine Rhine valley, Canton of the Grisons, Switzerland. Then, it has been extended to pest control strategies for the Pine Processionary moth metapopulation in the National Park of Aspromonte Calabria, Italy. In particular, cost-benefit analysis by mean of Fuzzy Decision Theory has been proposed (2005- )

FORMER RESEARCH ACTIVITY
Parametric and non-parametric inference
According to Wald (1949), weak conditions have been introduced to establish consistency of estimators defined in the Ph.D. Thesis. An asymptotic measure of their robustness to the presence of outliers has also been introduced. This work suggested to study consistency properties of classical minimum distance estimators, that is of estimators obtained by minimizing suitable divergences between the empirical distribution and the adopted statistical model. Both grouped and continuous data have been considered. (2002-2004)
In applications of Bayesian analysis one problem that arises is that of evaluating the robustness of the adopted inferential procedure with respect to the components of the adopted statistical model. Robustness with respect to the prior distribution has been considered: the problem consists of finding the extrema of posterior functionals under a prior class defined as a generalized moment class. The solution has been shown to coincide, under suitable conditions, with the solution of a linear semi-infinite programming problem, which then leads the way to the implementation of effective numerical algorithms. (2002-2004)

Applications in Agrometeorology.
In cooperation with the Regional Environmental Protection Agency of Sardinia (Italy) (former Regional Agro Meteorological Service of Sardinia, Sassari, Italy), the relationship between a ripening index for the Sardinian Cannonau cultivar and some bioclimatic indices for grape has been studied, to model and predict the best harvest time useful for both technicians and grape growers. The research has been applied to more extended data sets and the lack of adequacy of the nonlinear models proved. (2003-2004)
In cooperation with CNR-IBIMET(Sassari, Italy) and the Centre Régional de la Recherche Agronomique de Settat (Marocco) methods for the evaluation of the impact of climate change in the Mediterranean areas on cereals crop yield have been studied (2010-2011).

Applications in Medicine
In cooperation with the Istituto Nazionale Neurologico "C. Besta" (Milan, Italy) some relationships between cardio-vascular diseases and genetic factors have been studied. In (1, 2, 3) a few results about the association between the risk of cerebral ischemia, some common polymorphisms of F-V, F-II, MTHFR, t-PA and PAI-1 genes and some factors of the fibrinolytic system are presented. The clinical relevance of aspirin resistant status, determined with the test of platelet functions PFA-100, to predict future thrombotic events in a prospective study on patients with stable ischemic cerebrovascular disease has then been studied, (4). (2003-2007)
A support activity to researches carried out at the Istituto di Ricerca Farmacologica "Mario Negri" (Milan, Italy) has concerned interim analysis and sample size determination in the Bayesian framework. (2003-2004)


PROJECTS
(see the related web page for short description of the projects)
Participant to the project MATHTECH - Mathematics for better society and technological innovation (Progetto Premiale MIUR 2012, 2013-2015)
Research activities concern health, climate, transportation and Factory of the Future.
Participant to the project INTEGRATE - INnovazioni TEcnologiche per una Gestione Razionale del Tessuto Edilizio (Framework agreement "Regione Lombardia-CNR"; 2013-2015)
Principal investigator of the project Statistical and differential models for the analysis of environmental phenomena (TA.P02.030, 2011-2014)
The project aims at developping methods and models to analyze several environmental phenomena causing damages to rural, urban and natural environment. In particular, sismic and climatic phenomena will be analyzed as well as biodiversity issues related to habitat management and conservation.
Participant to the project INTEGRATE - INnovazioni TEcnologiche per una Gestione Razionale del Tessuto Edilizio (Accordo quadro Regione Lombardia-CNR)
Partners: CNR-ITC, CNR-IENI, CNR-IRSA, CNR-CERIS (2013-2015)
Principal investigator of IMATI for the project A web-based system for real-time Monitoring and Decision Making for Integrated Vineyard Management (MODEM_IVM; FP7 reference number: 262059) (2011-2012).
Principal investigator the project CYCAS-MED-Crop yield and climate change impacts on agriculture: adaptation strategies to desertification processes in the Mediterranean areas (grant: Milano per la tutela della Biodiversità 2008), (2010-2011).
Partners: CNR-IBIMET (Sassari), Centre Régional de la Recherche Agronomique de Settat (Marocco)
CNR-IMATI technical responsible within the agreement ARPAS (Regional Environmental Protection Agency of Sardinia)- IMATI CNR for the project PROTERINA-C: A system for the forecast and the prevention of the impact of the variability of the climatic conditions on the risk for the natural and urbanized environment - European Union FESR program Italia-Francia "Marittimo" (Phase 2) Impacts of climate variability (2009-2010).
Participant to the project Por-Calabria 2000-2006: Pericolosità legata ai fenomeni di intensa erosione idrica areale e lineare (2009-2010)
Partners: CNR-IRPI (Cosenza), Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Tecnologie Agro-Forestali - Università di Palermo, CNR- I.S.A.Fo.M
Participant to the Project 06/01-CNR Advanced techniques of Bayesian decision making in complex systems (2004-2006, 2007-2009).
Partner: Institute of Information Theory and Automation (UTIA, Prague)



Other topics of interest
Modelling Uncertainty and Fuzzy Sets
Design of experiments


Extended curriculum (.pdf)