About
Ciao! I'm Roberto. I am a Technical Investor at the AI Fund of CDP Venture Capital, where I focus on post-seed AI, Cyber, and Quantum startups. I also advise most of the funds on AI deals. My technical background lets me engage deeply with founders and CTOs on their products and technology.
Previously I was an AI Researcher at ETH Zurich, working with Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Mrinmaya Sachan on LLM evaluation and causal reasoning.
MSc in Data Science from EPFL · BSc in Economics & Computer Science from Bocconi University.
If you are an AI startup founder looking for feedback, book a slot with me.
Currently Tinkering
Side projects and research threads I'm actively working on.
Current Portfolio
Deals at the AI Fund of CDP Venture Capital since January 2025. Dual goal: financial returns and growth of the Italian AI ecosystem.
Experience
Research
Focused on LLM evaluation via natural questions and causal reasoning.
13K naturally occurring questions from search engines, human–human, and human–LLM interactions. Accepted at CALM @ NeurIPS 2024 and NAACL Findings 2025.
NLP CausalityEvaluation framework using questions that reflect real user behavior rather than curated benchmarks.
LLM EvalsProjects
Web app with visualizations and search on Italian train delays. Open-source initiative to promote railway data transparency.
Web Open DataRe-implemented Pix2Seq-D from TensorFlow to PyTorch and adapted the architecture for video panoptic segmentation.
Computer Vision PyTorch VideoUsed Causal Representation Learning to improve classifier accuracy on out-of-distribution data.
Causality ML PDFNLP analysis of Quotebank (178M rows) measuring lexical complexity differences across American politicians.
NLP Big DataFine-tuned Distilled GPT-2 with a Deberta reward model using Constitutional AI, biasing outputs toward clarity, correctness, and rigour for STEM students.
NLP RLHF PDFGenerated realistic synthetic images of C. elegans using StyleGAN2-ADA for settings where biological data is scarce.
Generative Models Computer Vision GitHubBuilt a probabilistic journey planner for Zurich using SBB data, matching Google Maps results with added confidence scores.
Big Data Spark VideoSurvey on Nash equilibria approximation via CFR and reinforcement learning from self-play for poker bots.
Game Theory RL PDFCompared MCMC algorithms (Metropolis-Hastings, Houdayer) for community detection, analyzing convergence and cluster connectivity.
Statistics Algorithms PDFAffiliations
Essays
Thoughts on AI, investing, and technology.