| Domenico Lacavalla | AI Researcher - Applied Scientist |
I am an AI Researcher on a mission to use artificial intelligence to create solutions with tangible, positive impact. My passion lies at the intersection of cutting-edge research and hands-on application, where innovative ideas become robust and scalable systems.
I currently work as an AI Researcher & Applied Scientist at Leonardo Labs in Turin, Italy, where I focus on advancing applied AI research in areas such as NLP, computer vision, and large language models.
Previously, at IBM, I worked as a Data Scientist & Applied Scientist for over two years. There I designed and deployed end-to-end AI solutions for enterprise clients: implementing CPU multimodal retrieval pipelines (Grounding DINO, SBERT-Whisper) that boosted speed by 31% and recall to 83%, orchestrating ancient map geocoding with GenAI correction and DBSCAN (68.6% accuracy), bootstrapping few-shot SBERT classifiers deployed via ONNX, and building hybrid LLM/SBERT anomaly detection pipelines that saved $1,000+/month on 5M+ samples. I also boosted summarization throughput 5x via parallelized LLM inference on A100 HPC.
In parallel, I actively pursue research. I was a Google Summer of Code 2024 contributor with HumanAI, where I explored the evolution of language in Dark Web communities. Outside of work, I dedicate my free time to reproducing and extending recent research papers, often tweaking methodologies or applying them to novel contexts. This keeps me close to the academic frontier and continuously refines my understanding of language models and representation learning.
This blend of industry experience and independent research reflects my drive to bridge theory and practice. Academically, I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (110/110 cum Laude) and I’m currently pursuing a Master’s in Data Science at UNIBA.
My long-term goal is to pursue a PhD in Natural Language Processing, where I can deepen my expertise and contribute to solving complex language problems—transforming research into real-world impact.
Beyond my professional and academic pursuits, I have a passion for boxing, which teaches discipline and mental resilience, and I enjoy the intellectual challenge of solving Rubik’s cubes and other logic puzzles.
Tech Stack
Python, Java, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, Transformers, Pandas, Scikit-learn, SQL, OpenCV, NumPy, AWS, Docker, OpenShift, PostgreSQL, Git, Spark, CUDA, SLURM