Andrea Baraldi

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT ANDREA BARALDI

I am Andrea Baraldi, I have a Bachelor\'s and Master\'s degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia where I am now a third-year PhD student in Computer Science (until October 2024). Within the PhD I decided to research on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for textual applications, but I also ranged in different areas. I studied how to explain the decisions taken by entity matching models, I innovated and adapted state-of-the-art XAI tools to this field. During this project, I published 2 papers in international journals. Subsequently, I designed a system that exploits the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in an intrinsically explainable way for the same application. In addition to comparing the descriptions, this system provides a justification by showing the importance of the words in the alignment. Regarding this project, I have published 1 article in an international journal. Later I collaborated with a Microsoft research team on optimizing a fairness model to improve its scalability on large amounts of data making it faster by an order of magnitude. Starting in March 2024, I spent a 3-month Erasmus period at EURECOM (Antibes, France), where I studied the application of explanation techniques on fact-checking models. These models must establish the truth of a statement given a set of evidence pieces. During this experience I studied how to evaluate the reasoning of these models, comparing the detected behavior over some principles of logical reasoning. In parallel to the research activity, I participated in 2 projects aimed at stimulating soft skills related to innovation and entrepreneurship. During the project ‘Talents for Open Innovation’ I worked with an interdisciplinary group of PhD students from various Italian universities to design an innovation management methodology following the needs of and collaborating with an IT consulting company. During the final event, I presented the innovation management framework produced by my group. In the TACC (Training for Automotive Companies Creation) project, together with other PhD and Master\'s students from various universities in Emilia Romagna, I attended in-person lessons and practice sessions focused on the creation of ideas, business management, start-up management, and effective communication. I discussed and compared my innovative ideas related to the automotive field, formed a team, and worked to develop business plans, pitches, pre-totypes, and development strategies.