AI / ML Research
Foundation models for medical imaging (self-supervised ViT, distributed training), reproducible evaluation, and a defined path from research to clinical validation.
Hi, I'm Francesco 👋 · High-Tech Artisan
I find out when the model is wrong.
PhD engineer and researcher. I work on medical-imaging foundation models, robots on factory floors, and the infrastructure that keeps both running in production. Whether it starts as a research question or a production problem, the work is the same.
FV 
Ten years, research & industry
- Univ. Naples Federico II
- Univ. Siena
- TU Wien
- TU Munich
- Disney Research
- Roboception
- Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
What I do
Three areas, one throughline: getting AI to production.
Robotics & Edge
ROS2 navigation and perception, real-time inference on NVIDIA Jetson, and industrial systems deployed commercially across multiple countries.
DevOps & Infrastructure
Self-hosted single-node Kubernetes (k3s) with Helm, health-gated reversible delivery, CI/CD, and hands-on production incident debugging.
Selected work
Evidence, not slideware.
AI / ML Research
Foundation Model for Gastroenterology Imaging
SSL pretraining strategy and cloud data pipeline for a ViT foundation model on 5M+ gastrointestinal video frames.
- Self-Supervised Learning
- PyTorch
- Medical Imaging
Robotics & Edge
Edge AI Occupancy Monitoring System
Real-time people tracking and zone-based automation running on NVIDIA Jetson at the edge.
- NVIDIA Jetson
- Computer Vision
- PyTorch
Robotics & Edge
Autonomous Navigation for an Industrial Cleaning Robot
An indoor autonomous navigation stack for a commercial ride-on floor scrubber.
- ROS2
- Nav2
- SLAM
My story
From a robotics thesis at Disney to AI in the clinic.
I studied engineering in Siena, and did my Master's thesis at Disney Research Zurich, on closed-loop control for a robot that shakes your hand, which ended up as a paper in IEEE RA-L. That set the tone for everything since: I like building things that have to work with real people, in the real world.
I spent years in Germany making that happen: autonomous mobile robots deployed across factories, and core 3D-perception and grasping software at Roboception for industrial pick-and-place. Then I went back to research for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD in Naples, with secondments at TU Wien and studying how robots make their intentions legible to people.
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