I became professor (maître de conférences) after spending two years as postdoc and two as senior research fellow within the Department of Digital Security at EURECOM Graduate School and Research Center, Sophia Antipolis, France.

In my former career, I carried out my research for many years in the Department of Electronic Engineering at University of Rome "Tor Vergata", where I also served the Master in Sonic Arts as technical coordinator. In the same period, I even joined the research centre Fondazione Ugo Bordoni of Rome, where I spent three years as a researcher.

I have developed my research profile across diverse fields including signal processing, statistical pattern recognition, machine and deep learning, speech, audio and music processing, speaker verification, privacy preservation and anti-spoofing. 

My educational background has had an extremely strong influence on my progress and interests. After I have obtained a Master's degree in Physics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and later in Sound Engineering, summa cum laude, I have earned my PhD in Sensorial and Learning Systems Engineering from "Tor Vergata" University. Also, I hold a Diploma's degree in Trumpet from the Music Conservatory of Frosinone "Licino Refice".

In my PhD research project, I have examined specific aspects of automatic music transcription, which consists in transforming the audio waveform into a symbolic (human-readable) notation, commonly called sheet music.

During my time as a researcher, I also taught a variety of subjects including mathematics, physics, digital signal processing and machine learning at EURECOM, Tor Vergata University of Rome, IUAV University of Venice, as well as, Music Conservatory of Rome and Bari.

I am best known for my contributions to fake audio detection. I am the inventor of the constant Q cepstral coefficients (CQCCs), the most used feature and source of inspiration for many researchers in speech processing, speaker recognition and anti-spoofing field. My two seminal papers at ODYSSEY 2016 (Best Paper Award) and Computer Speech & Language (2017) on CQCC extraction have attracted a significant number of citations, making this work the highest-cited technical contribution in the area of fake audio detection.

More recently, I have secured my own research funding from H2020 MSCA and ANR to start new research in privacy preservation for biometrics and spoofed/fake signal detection. The objective of this research is to develop new encryption algorithms that support computation upon signals, templates and models in the encrypted domain, and explore the potential of using multi-biometrics as a means to defend against diverse attacks and improve generalisation while still preserving privacy.

Currently, I am co-organaising two international challenges: the ASVspoof and the VoicePrivacy.

I am the Managing Guest Editor of the CSL Special issue on Advances in Automatic Speaker Verification Anti-spoofing.

I have published over 120 papers to date.

Listed below my non-exhaustive biographical timeline.