I am a post-doctoral fellow in Machine Learning, University of Toronto. I have been working in Geoffrey Hinton's lab since July 2009. I did my Ph.D. in Computer Science at New York University in Yann LeCun's group. I am originally from Padova in Italy, where I graduated in Electronics Engineering. I am interested in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. I have worked on Unsupervised Learning algorithms to learn representations of data with desirable properties like compactness and sparsity. My projects had applications in a wide range of domains, from visual object recognition to text document classification and retrieval.