Could you tell us about your journey to UCLA?
I was first at UCLA as an undergraduate exchange student from the University of Padua (Italy) in '92/'93. I loved the experience, and, after graduating, I applied to the PhD program in linguistics, which I started in '95.
Can you speak a little bit about your career and how it has progressed since graduating from UCLA?
My first job was in a small speech technology company in Seattle. I then moved to Vienna for a post-doc at the Austrian Research Institute for AI. I subsequently got a tenured position at the University of Bologna in Italy, and moved to the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento (Italy). From 2016 to 2021, I worked as a scientist for Facebook AI Research (Paris). I am now a research professor at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advances Studies, in Barcelona (Spain).
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How do you think UCLA prepares students to fill positions that have a global reach and influence?
The most important things that UCLA taught me were to be bold and original in my research, not to fear change and think about how to solve the most interesting problems I face without worrying whether I am "qualified" to tackle them or not. These are obviously important skills to achieve some degree of global reach.