Ernesto Casablanca's CV

Introduction

I'm passionate about the entire IT sector, in all its ramifications, but I admit to having a soft spot for software development, with a particular focus on best practices, design patterns, CI/CD processes, and, more generally, everything related to the world of cloud computing. My curiosity has driven me to explore a wide range of sectors, gaining transversal knowledge that I'd like to leverage to the fullest. I'm currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Newcastle University, with a focus on formal verification, both in the context of SMT solvers and cyberphysical systems.

Education

Newcastle University, Computer Science

PhD

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Sept 2023 – present

Università degli Studi di Catania, Computer Science

MS

Catania, IT

Sept 2021 – Sept 2023

Università degli Studi di Catania, Computer Science

BS

Catania, IT

Sept 2018 – Sept 2021

Experience

SymAware, Lead Software Engineer

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Jan 2024 – Apr 2026

2 years 4 months

Lead software engineer performing the integration of the components from all the consortium partners in the SymAware project, a Horizon Europe funded project aimed at developing a symbiotic autonomous driving system.

Newcastle University, Demonstrator

Catania, IT

Feb 2024 – Dec 2025

1 year 11 months

Mentored students in the undergraduate modules CSC2034, CSC1033, CSC8017, CSC3631, CSC8110, CSC3231, CSC3432

Università degli Studi di Catania, Tutor

Catania, IT

Sept 2022 – June 2023

10 months

Mentored students in the undergraduate courses 'Reti di Calcolatori (Networks)' and 'Ingegneria del Software (Software Engineering)'.

CTmobi, Software Engineer

Catania, IT

Nov 2021 – May 2022

7 months

Design and implementation of WordPress themes and plugins, frontend carousel and backend management SPA on behalf of networkdigital360, analysis and security audit of the code, debugging and optimization of web applications

Università degli Studi di Catania, Research Assistant

Catania, IT

Jan 2021 – Sept 2022

1 year 9 months

Research and investigation on the application of blockchain technology for trustworthiness in distributed energy production scenarios, funded by Prot. n. 0790700, 18/10/2021.

Freelance, Software Engineer

Catania, IT

Apr 2021 – Nov 2021

8 months

Telegram bot development and maintenance for small businesses

Activities

The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Singapore, SG

Jan 2026

Gave an oral presentation and presented a poster for the paper 'LUCID: Learning-Enabled Uncertainty-Aware Certification of Stochastic Dynamical Systems'.

HackTheBurgh XII

Edinburgh, UK

Nov 2025

Attended the 12th edition of the HackTheBurgh Hackathon.

UK Quantum Hackathon

Edinburgh, UK

Aug 2025

Attended the 2025 NQCC’s Quantum Hackathon.

Formula Student AI

Silverstone, UK

July 2025

Attended the 2025 IMECHE Formula Student AI competition at Silverstone Circuit with the Newcastle University team.

Drive Forward 2025

Eindhoven, Netherlands

Apr 2025

Presented a live demo of the SymAware framework.

HackTheBurgh X

Edinburgh, UK

Mar 2024

Attended the 10th edition of the HackTheBurgh Hackathon.

DURHACK

Durham, UK

Nov 2023

Attended the 2023 edition of the Durham University Hackathon.

CyberChallenge.IT

Turin, IT

June 2023

Attended the 2023 edition of the Italian Cybersecurity Challenge, a national competition organized by the Cybersecurity National Lab of CINI with the support of the Italian National Cybersecurity Agency.

BLOckchain for Renewables INtegration 2022 Workshop

Palermo, IT

Sept 2022

Gave an oral presentation for the paper 'Providing Trust in a Dynamic Distributed Energy Production Scenario by means of a Blockchain'.

Projects

LUCID

Lifting-based Uncertain Control Invariant Dynamics (LUCID) tool.

rules_doxygen

Bazel rules for generating Doxygen documentation.

IAC-VPN

Infrastructure as Code VPN solution to automatically deploy a VPN server on the cloud.

Dotingestion2

ETL pipeline for analysis of data coming from the DOTA 2 game.

Quantum random walk simulation

Study of quantum random walks using Qiskit

Linear System Solver

GPU parallelized implementation of a Gaussian elimination linear system solver.

Telegram SpottedDMI Bot

Telegram bot behind @Spotted_DMI_Bot, used by the computer science students in Catania.

Publications

LUCID: Learning-Enabled Uncertainty-Aware Certification of Stochastic Dynamical Systems

Mar 2026

Toolbox for the data-driven formal verification of stochastic dynamical systems.

Ernesto Casablanca, Oliver Schön, Paolo Zuliani, Sadegh Soudjani

10.1609/aaai.v40i24.39075 (AAAI 2026)

Blending Participatory Design and Artificial Awareness for Trustworthy Autonomous Vehicles

Nov 2025

Data-driven model of a human driver grounding via a large-scale user-centered study on human-AV interaction.

Ana Tanevska, Ananthapathmanabhan Ratheesh Kumar, Arabinda Ghosh, Ernesto Casablanca, Ginevra Castellano, Sadegh Soudjani

10.1109/RO-MAN63969.2025.11217774 (RO-MAN 2025)

SymAware: A Software Development Framework for Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems with Situational Awareness

Sept 2024

Software framework for developing trustworthy multi-agent systems with situational awareness.

Ernesto Casablanca, Zengjie Zhang, Gregorio Marchesini, Sofie Haesaert, Dimos V. Dimarogonas, Sadegh Soudjani

10.48550/arXiv.2409.14833 (arXiv preprint)

Providing Trust in a Dynamic Distributed Energy Production Scenario by means of a Blockchain

Feb 2023

Study on the application of blockchain technology for trustworthiness in dynamic distributed energy production scenarios.

Andrea Calvagna, Ernesto Casablanca, Giovanni Marotta, Giuseppe Pappalardo, Emiliano Tramontana

10.1109/BLORIN54731.2022.10028019 (BLORIN 2022)

Skills

Spoken Languages: Italian (Native), English (C1), Chinese (Beginner)

Programming Languages: Python, C++, C, C#, Java, JavaScript, Typescript, PHP, SQL, Bash, GDScript, MATLAB, OpenCL, CUDA, Solidity, Kotlin

Cloud: Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, CloudFormation

Frameworks and Libraries: NumPy, matplotlib, Pandas, SciPy, GMP, ROS, React, Astro

Tools: Git, GitHub, Docker, LaTeX, Jupyter, VS Code, CLion, Bazel, WordPress, Godot, Unity, Prescan, CARLA, pybullet, Tamarin, Mermaid, Kafka, Spark

Databases: SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra

Accreditations

Videogames

Without roots, Tower defense

Aug 2021

Ernesto Casablanca, Corrado Crisafulli, Alice Bivona, Matteo Franchetti

Deep down, Platformer

Feb 2021

Ernesto Casablanca, Corrado Crisafulli, Alice Bivona

Moonlight, Puzzle, Platformer

Aug 2020

Ernesto Casablanca, Corrado Crisafulli