What do you like to do outside of work?
I like to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle. In particular, I have always loved playing team sports. I started as a child, playing basketball for almost 10 years. Later I discovered a passion for five-a-side football, which I still play now with a team made up of some friends from Montegiorgio, which has been entered in the CSI tournament in the province of Fermo for several years. When I’m not busy with sport or work, I like to go out with my old friends from Porto Sant’Elpidio, drink a good beer and chat with them. In addition, together with my girlfriend, I often like to go in search of new restaurants in Le Marche, both gourmet restaurants and smaller, more unusual ones, to discover new flavours and enjoy new culinary experiences.
Artificial intelligence is your bread and butter. How did your passion for this discipline come about?
My passion for artificial intelligence was born during the development of a project for a course in Robotics, while I was attending a Master’s degree course in Computer Science in Ancona. Specifically, my group was tasked with training a mechanical arm, equipped with a camera, to pick up coloured objects above a desk, all automatically.
Thanks to this project, I discovered the fantastic world of Machine Learning (a branch of Artificial Intelligence) and achieved good results with the robot. The desire to get better and better led me to study the next step in that approach, namely Deep Learning and neural networks. I developed these techniques with passion, first for my Master’s thesis and then later during my PhD.
I am always looking for new challenges and opportunities to apply my knowledge in this field, which is constantly evolving.
What is the project you have enjoyed working on most at Gate-away.com?
The project I have enjoyed working on most concerns the automatic generation of a property description, starting from its images and structured data (such as price, property type, location, etc.) defined by the property owner. This project was born a few years ago out of the collaboration between my research group and Gate-away.com. Working on this project was very interesting because it allowed me to study and test different approaches from the world of Deep Learning. I started with the main CV (Computer Vision) techniques for extracting information from images, up to the most recent NLP (Natural Language Processing) approaches for automatically generating descriptions.
Did team sports also affect your teamwork in any way?
Probably yes. Team sport helps develop a greater ability to collaborate and coordinate with teammates. You learn to communicate more effectively, to respect the roles and responsibilities of others, to work together to achieve a common goal. These are all skills that can definitely have a positive influence on my teamwork in this company.
I hope my answers have satisfied your curiosity! And if you are wondering how I managed to answer so well, I’ll tell you the secret: I asked my friend ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence that assists in writing, for help!
Massimo Martini
AI Specialist
My corner of Italy: Segesta