About Me


Overview

I am a very strange individual, to say the least. I'm a "1.5"-generation American; meaning that I was born in New York City, however, I also spent the first 6 years of my life in Cortina D'Ampezzo, Belluno, Italy, where my family is originally from. I'm also a first generation Computer Scientist. I'm technically trilingual, although the only language I'm truly comfortable in nowadays is English (and C, Java and so forth of course ;))

I'm a gamer at heart and I've logged thousands of hours in various video games ever since getting my hands on a Nintendo 64 at age 4. I play all sorts of video games ranging from DotA 2 and League of Legends, to Kerbal Space Program, PAYDAY 2 (a recent favorite) all the way to Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare. I'm mainly a PC gamer, but I also enjoy consoles from time to time.


Hackathons

I love working on interesting projects! In the past few years, I've traveled across the USA and attended many hackathons, including:

  • HackMIT 2013
  • HackMIT 2014*
  • MHacks IV
  • PennApps X
*A few friends at Wisconsin and I teamed up to solve HackMIT's puzzle for guaranteed admission and free travel, CatMIT! It was a blast, we were one of just a few teams to solve it, and we had a great time at HackMIT 2014.
**Update: We also just did the same thing for HackMIT 2015! We were re-invited to attend, but were not able to make it.

I also helped organize MadHacks 2015, UW's first national hackathon! We got some coverage from the CS department for the year that we spent making this event a reality.

Coursework

Not only am I a graduate student here at Wisconsin, but I also had the pleasure of doing my undergrad here.

Graduate:

Spring 2016
Undergraduate
  • CS 302: Intro to Programming
  • CS 367: Data Structures and Algorithms
  • ECE/CS 352: Digital Systems Fundamentals
  • CS/ECE 354: Machine Organization and Basic Systems
  • CS 540: Artificial Intelligence
  • CS 536: Programming Languages and Compilers
  • CS 537: Operating Systems
  • CS 577: Algorithms
  • CS 640: Computer Networks
  • CS 642: Computer Security
  • Math 240: Discrete Mathematics
  • Math 221/222/234: Calculus I, II, III
  • Math 340: Elementary Matrix and Linear Algebra
To those not familiar with Wisconsin's CS course nomenclature:
  • -500/600 level "intro" courses are capstone undergrad / beginning grad courses.
  • -700/800 level courses are core graduate courses
  • -An up-to-date description of all courses can be found here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/courses/list

Research

I was formerly an Undergraduate Research Assistant at UW-Madison. More info will be forthcoming, but here is the gist of my research experience:

From September 2014 to May 2015, I've been working with Prof. Tom Ristenpart , Prof. Mike Swift, and Adam Everspaugh on Swiftbuffer. Swiftbuffer is a continuation of previous work, Not So Random Numbers by Everspaugh et al, which created a new and more secure RNG for the Linux Kernel. Although more secure, it was not quite efficient enough to make it into the kernel - as it was not built upon being incredibly efficient. We're working to improve this to hopefully get accepted as an official Linux Kernel patch!

In Summer 2014, I worked with Prof. Karu Sankaralingam on a project to port CPU code to the GPU with minimal programmer involvement. We submitted our findings to ASPLOS 2015 - although I can't distribute the paper, if you are interested, shoot me an email! I may be able to get you a copy. Regardless, I'm almost always up for a chat.

Industry

My industry experience spans across many different fields including customer service, IT, networking, and software engineering which is my primary field of focus. A detailed description of all of my relevant positions can be found in my resume. Here is a rough list of my positions:

  • Post-Grad: Software Engineer at Riot Games (July 2017 and on)
  • Summer 2016: Software Engineering Intern at Riot Games
  • Summer 2015: Software Engineer Intern at Visa
  • Fall 2013: Mobile Game Developer at UW-Madison
  • Summer 2013: Web Applications Developer at Wisconsin School of Business
  • August 2012 - May 2013: Network Technician (Tier 3 TS) at UW-River Falls
  • August 2011 - February 2012: Tier 1 Technical Support at AT&T