Theoretical physicist with a soft spot for statistical mechanics, currently a member of the Physics of Complex Systems Laboratory at EPFL. After graduating from the University of Bari, I obtained my PhD at the University of Edinburgh by studying biologically relevant interfaces, such as the membrane of a cell, within the framework of kinetic roughening. Throughout my studies I have developed an interest in the theory of learning, both for artificial and real neural networks, which I am pursuing at present by seeking a theoretical understanding of modern machine learning methods. In particular, I aim at relating the success of such methods to the interplay between the structure of the tasks to learn and that of the method itself.