About

I'm Valerio, an AI engineer and tech lead in Zurich. I build systems around language models: the agents, the tools they use, and the evaluation that tells you whether they work.

How I got here

I started in physics, with a master's degree at Sapienza University of Rome.

For my PhD I moved to KAUST, in Saudi Arabia, and to electrical engineering. I worked on cryptography that is built into the physics of chaotic silicon chips. I also simulated those devices in C++ on supercomputers.

In 2019 I came to Zurich as a postdoc at the University of Zurich. I kept simulating photonic devices, and I won two grants of my own.

In 2020 I founded Syntheticus, a company that makes synthetic data: records with the statistics of real data that belong to nobody. For four years I led its AI engineering. That meant generative models, differential privacy, and a layer that keeps personal data away from language models.

Since 2024 I have worked independently, through my own company. My work is now on language models: agent systems, fine-tuning and evaluation.

I live in Zurich. I speak Italian, English and some German.

What I work on now

• Agent systems. Several agents that work together, the tools they call, and the control loop around them. See AI coaching from poker hand histories.
• Fine-tuning for specific domains. Supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, depending on what the task needs, and an honest comparison with the frontier models. See reinforcement learning for a pentesting agent.
• Evaluation. The tests that show whether a change made a system better, or only different.
• Synthetic data and privacy. On the EU project SEARCH, I work on how to judge whether synthetic health data is safe and still useful. See SDAC and my own generative model for health records.

In my own time I build products and run small experiments that test popular claims about AI.

Education

• PhD in Electrical Engineering, KAUST 2013 – 2019
• MSc in Physics, Sapienza University of Rome 2010 – 2013

Grants and awards

• Horizon Europe grant, as a consortium member (Syntheticus share €1M) 2024
• University of Zurich postdoc grant, CHF 130K 2022
• SNSF Bridge, CHF 150K 2022
• Taqadam, $150K 2019
• Best poster award, META 2018

Contact

If you are working on an AI project, email me with a few lines about it. You can also find me on LinkedIn, GitHub and X.