Jacopo D'Abundo

MSc student in Mathematical Engineering (Statistical Learning) at Politecnico di Milano. Milan, Italy.

About

I'm in the first year of an MSc at Politecnico di Milano, where I also did my BSc in Mathematical Engineering. Outside coursework I do machine learning research, on my own and with collaborators: time-series language models, agents that combine learning with search, and medical imaging.

I try to measure things properly: fix the criteria before looking at the results, run controls, and keep the negative results. Most of the code in my projects is written by AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex) from my briefs. I set the questions, make the design and go/no-go decisions, review the diffs and the numbers, and often have one agent audit another's work.

Research and work

Time-series language models

Aug 2026 –

Independent research

The direction came out of the ETH Agentic Systems Lab selection, where I reached the deep-dive interview; the work itself is independent and not an ETH project. It builds on the lab's TimeRLM training pipeline and AnomalyXL benchmark. I replaced the encoder with a multi-resolution Haar-wavelet encoder whose output goes into Qwen3.5-4B as soft tokens (LoRA), and added a zoom action that lets the model re-read a window of the signal it chooses.

On two held-out confirmation sets, zoom plus two small fitted corrections for the window's centre and length localized 112/157 and 113/161 anomalies at IoU ≥ 0.5, against 88 and 77 for the reference model. The zoom on its own did not clear that bar, and GRPO post-training gave no real gain. Integrity checks along the way found and quarantined a train/test leak and led me to retract an earlier result that came from a coordinate shortcut.

Airway analysis in chest CT

May 2026 –

Remote collaboration with researchers at the University of Michigan and Emory University

The agreed starting task was estimating the airway wall around a given lumen segmentation, on the public ATM'22 data. On my own initiative I prototyped two machine-learning extensions. The first repairs breaks in segmented airway trees with Monte Carlo Tree Search; a controlled experiment showed that, with that reward, search chose the same links as a greedy rule. The second trains "judges" that decide whether a gap in an nnU-Net mask is a real missing segment (a multimodal LLM with a 3D wavelet encoder, a small probe, gradient boosting), with nnU-Net baselines on the Politecnico HPC cluster. The judges worked on synthetic breaks but did not transfer to real ones, so I archived that line.

Simulation Engineer, Rilemo

Jul – Sep 2026

Medtech startup, remote

Rilemo builds a portable electromagnetic imaging device for the head. I worked on electromagnetic simulation and on generating 3D multi-tissue head models for data augmentation. Details are under NDA.

Projects

Scotland Yard AI

Feb – Jul 2026

A simulator of the Scotland Yard board game (199 stations, 468 connections) with AI players for both sides. The classical baselines are Bayesian belief tracking for the detectives and Monte Carlo Tree Search for Mr. X. On top of them, relational graph neural network policy/value models trained with behavioural cloning, PPO and distillation from search, inside a self-play league where a checkpoint is promoted only if it passes an evaluation gate (8 of 18 did). Against the same MCTS Mr. X, the learned detectives win 79% of games and the heuristic ones 25% (100 games per matchup). A bug in the gate had made early gains look cumulative; after fixing it, the real gain per iteration was 0.3 to 1.7 percentage points of win rate.

Translation pipeline for public-domain books

Aug 2026 –

A semi-automated pipeline that translates public-domain books with LLMs and publishes them as ebooks and paperbacks. Each batch goes through structural checks, two blind reviews (literary and semantic) and an arbiter model when they disagree; the build step checks its own output before upload, and each of those checks was added after a real rejection from Amazon. About 34,000 lines of Python and 188 tests; 24 editions published on 6 Amazon marketplaces by September 2026.

TilesWord

Jul – Oct 2025

A multiplayer web word game with Scrabble-style rules, real-time play and Elo ratings. The computer opponent is the open-source Quackle C++ engine, connected through a JSON bridge and a FastAPI service. React, TypeScript and Supabase, built with Lovable, Codex and Cursor.

Seoul bike demand

2026

A statistical inference course project in R, reworked and published. Log-linear regression with cyclical time encodings, stepwise selection and full diagnostics (adjusted R² 0.77; RMSE 0.67 on the log scale on days never seen in training), and a logistic classifier for demand peaks with a decision threshold derived from error costs.

Education

MSc Mathematical Engineering, Statistical Learning

Sep 2026 –

Politecnico di Milano, taught in English

This semester: Real and Functional Analysis, Stochastic Dynamical Models, Game Theory, Algorithms and Parallel Computing, Artificial Neural Networks and Deep Learning.

Erasmus+ exchange

Spring 2027

Grenoble INP – Ensimag, M1 Applied Mathematics (MSIAM), planned

BSc Mathematical Engineering

2023 – 2026

Politecnico di Milano

Other