I received the bachelor's degree at the "Università degli studi di Catania" (2005) and the master's degree (2008) at the "Politecnico di Milano" in computer engineering both with full marks (summa cum laude). The topic of my bachelor thesis was the development of a spiking-neural network for the navigation of wheeled robots. My master thesis was about software engineering for robotics; in particular I developed a framework for comparing quantitatively software architectures for robot control at the functional level. After my master, I worked 6 months at the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab (AIR-lab) of the Politecnico di Milano as a research co-worker in the topic of affective computing. The project aimed at classifing human subject's emotional states based on a statistical analysis of their biological signals such as blood volume pressure (BVP), heart rate, galvanic skin response (GSR). In 2009 I joined the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the University of Zurich as a PhD candidate.