Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems for Engineering

2026 – Present

Università degli Studi di Enna "Kore", Enna, Italy

• Doctoral research focused on intelligent systems, physics-informed operator learning, and large-scale continuous optimization.

Master's Degree in AI and Cybersecurity Engineering (LM-32)

2024 – 2026

Università degli Studi di Enna "Kore", Enna, Italy

• Final Grade: 110/110 cum laude with Academic Career Honors and Thesis Commendation.
• Advanced specialization in evolutionary computation, numerical integration methods, differential equations, and deep learning architectures.

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering (L-8)

2021 – 2024

Università degli Studi di Enna "Kore", Enna, Italy

• Final Grade: 108/110
• Foundations in software engineering, applied algorithms, databases, and computer systems.

Distributed Cooperative Co-Evolution CPSO (LSGO)

2026

• Designed CoC-CPSO, an SPMD-based distributed framework for Large-Scale Global Optimization featuring Differential Grouping.
• Engineered an Overlapping Sliding Windows fallback for non-separable components, validated against the IEEE GNBG-III benchmark suite.

SemEval 2026 Task 13: GenAI Code Detection & Attribution

2026 – International Top 10 Ranking

• Developed a modular unified pipeline addressing binary detection, model attribution, and mixed-source code analysis.
• Achieved top-tier Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization across unseen programming languages and unseen LLM generators.

T-CPSOCB: Multimodal Emotion Recognition

2026

• Architected an audio-video emotion recognition engine extracting representations via Transformer backbones (VideoMAE & WavLM).
• Optimized CatBoost classification ensembles via CPSO evolutionary swarms integrated with late-fusion strategies.

Audio Signal Classification via CNN

2025

• Constructed an end-to-end PyTorch pipeline for multilabel musical instrument classification leveraging spectrogram representations (Librosa).

Research Collaborator & Scientific Author

2026

Università degli Studi di Enna "Kore", Enna, Italy

• Collaborated with academic research teams on high-performance evolutionary heuristics and multimodal machine learning models.
• Co-authored peer-reviewed research papers on distributed CPSO paradigms and hybrid Transformer-CatBoost pipelines.

IT Lecturer & Academic Mentor (GOL / PNRR Programs)

2025 – 2026

Centro Studi Socio-Culturali "L. Sciascia" / Professional Practice, Canicattì (AG), Italy

• Delivered institutional instruction for regional digital literacy and workforce reskilling projects (Avviso 6/2025 GOL - P1 & P3).
• Conducted training modules on digital competencies, warehouse logistics computing, and applied IT systems.

Graduate Research Fellow – Water 4.0 Project

2025

Università degli Studi di Enna "Kore", Enna, Italy

• Developed sequential predictive architectures (LSTM) optimized through distributed Island-CPSO variants for continuous water leakage estimation in urban networks.

Full-Stack Software Engineer (Post-Graduate Internship)

2024

Shannon Italia, Siracusa, Italy

• Engineered web platforms and established robust software engineering and architectural design principles.

Full-Stack Web Developer

2023 – 2024

Visicom Web SRL, Caltanissetta, Italy

• Designed and deployed responsive client-server web apps, e-commerce solutions, and database architectures (PHP, JS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Express).

T-CPSOCB: Transformers-Based CPSO Optimised CatBoost for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

IEEE MetroLivEnv – 2026

M. Collotta, G. L. Di Prima, G. G. Iacuzzo, A. Ricciardello, M. Ruggieri

• Published in 2026 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Living Environment (MetroLivEnv), pp. 96–100.
• Presents a multimodal emotion recognition framework leveraging Transformer embeddings (VideoMAE & WavLM) coupled with CPSO-tuned CatBoost classifiers.

CPSO for Innovative Transport Planning and Designing

Springer LNCS – 2025

T. Campisi, G. G. Iacuzzo, A. Ricciardello, M. Ruggieri

• Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), pp. 304–318.
• Investigates the application of Continuous Particle Swarm Optimization (CPSO) for tuning LSTM architectures in urban transport planning and traffic flow forecasting.

Smart Greenhouse Simulation With Simulink and TrueTime

Author – 2024

EMEA & Pakistan Students Paper Competition

• Certificate of Appreciation for research presented at an international academic competition on networked AIoT systems.