Antonio Ercole De Luca

Where to buy it

Is a website that embodies my philosophy of working smarter, not harder. The website was developed with the goal of helping users make informed purchasing decisions while reducing the time and effort they spend researching products.The website uses advanced Natural Language Processing techniques to extract valuable information from user reviews on Amazon, which is then presented in the form of detailed product reviews. By automating the research process, where2buy.it allows users to spend less time researching products and more time enjoying the things they love. It's a perfect example of how technology can be used to make our lives easier.

Where to invest in

In 2020, I had time to experiment and study new technologies. I had some savings but no idea where to invest. I started writing code using some open-source libraries to perform time series forecasting using Bayesian models. The algorithm was able to identify the most interesting Exchange Traded Funds on the market. From that, I refined it by making it create a balanced portfolio with minimum variance. I couldn't keep the algorithm secret on my hard disk, so I made a platform on top of that. Now, everybody can download the most promising ETF and autonomously invest. For free.

CreativeQuant.dev

Everything started with me publishing a picture of a book on Linkedin. The book was Financial Machine Learning by De Prado, and that post took an unexpected and unmotivated amount of attention. I concluded that the book's topic was of high interest among my professional circle composed by software developers.

At the time, I decided to open a blog called Creative Quant, initially containing the output of an experiment I made using real data. It was an interesting experience, but I am not sure that the technical writer is going to be my career path. At least, it was an opportunity to perform validated learning.

Open Source

During the first lockdown, I took some time off to contribute to an open-source project: Dask. It was an intriguing and challenging mental activity, design and implement a new feature in a library used to perform distributed scientific computing.

The feature I implemented is random sampling on Distributed Sets (Bags). Implementing it allowed me to face the main challenges the Big data sector has to deal with daily.

If you want to read more on it, I wrote a medium post with its explanation and proof.

Palermo Python Meetup

Since 2019, together with a couple of friends, we started Python Meetup Palermo, inspiring innovative ideas to a fertile local community. Regarding the location, Palermo is a place that I use to call the Italian Canary Islands because of its perpetual good climate and excellent high quality of living.

Statistics for Data Analysis

After many years of working experience with international clients, plus a Bachelor's and Master's degree, I decided to get back on Math and enroll at the department of Statistics at the University of Palermo.

Kiwi Bot

I worked with Kiwi Bot for three months at Skydeck Berkeley incubator. I stumbled across Sasha Iatsenia, head of product at Kiwi Bot, even before he joined the company. We met some years before during a nomadic camp in Lanzarote, the Canary Islands.

Digital Nomad

Everything started working on an open-source project I created to learn Python. The project was a Web Scraper using Selenium, which took attention on github.com. I started using Upwork to get remote jobs. Then, I realized I could spend my earnings traveling and exploring the world.

I started living as a digital nomad visiting countries such as Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Canary Islands, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy. Then I moved for three months in Perù and one in Berkeley, United States.

Spazio Dati

During a year-long internship at SpazioDati, I worked with Ugo Scaiella and prof. Paolo Ferragina, on an Active Learning technique, which efficiently selects textual snippets to be annotated by humans. The dataset was created using the platform CrowdFlower (now re-branded as Figure Eight).

I trained a logistic regression model to replace one of the steps of SpazioDati’s proprietary Entity Linking system (SaaS): namely Dandelion.

Università di Pisa

I graduated from Università di Pisa with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, then a Master's degree in Data Science and Business Informatics. During my studies, I explored different research fields, including Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. During those years I also worked on a European Research Project on Information Extraction. Thanks to Erasmus LLP Programme I had the chance to study at Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain.