Federico Semeraro

  • Hello and welcome to my portfolio!

  • I am a CV/ML Engineer at Apple, working within the algorithms team of the Vision Products Group. With a robust background in computational physics and numerical modeling, my previous role was at NASA Ames Research Center in the Thermal Protection Division. There, I co-led the development of PuMA, winner of the 2022 NASA Software of the Year. My research was primarily focused on analyzing and predicting the thermal properties of heatshield materials through CT microstructural data analysis.

  • My past experiences include internships at various companies such as Airbus, Earth-i, and Planet Labs, which helped me shape my passion for computer vision. My projects spanned from analyzing aircraft movements, to processing satellite imagery to gather insights, to natural scene generation. I am well-versed in several coding languages, especially Python, and I am currently extending my knowledge of PyTorch while implementing the latest deep learning techniques.

  • Academically, I completed a Master in Computer Science with a specialization in Computational Perception from the Georgia Institute of Technology in August 2023. I graduated from Imperial College London in June 2018 with a Master in Aerospace Engineering. My education commenced with a scientific highschool diploma from Liceo Sant'Alessandro, Bergamo (Italy).

  • In my (*sigh* limited) free time, you can find me on a soccer field, tennis court, or hiking somewhere in the Bay Area.

  • Whether it's to discuss new ideas, opportunities, or even just chat over a cup of coffee, please don't hesitate to reach out!

Career Journey

Projects

Research

arXiv 2024

arcjetCV: an open-source software to analyze material ablation

Authors: Alexandre Quintart, Magnus Haw, Federico Semeraro

A python package to automate time-resolved measurements of heatshield material recession from arcjet videos via edge detection and tracking.

arXiv 2023

TomoSAM: Slicer's extension for 3D segmentation

Authors: Federico Semeraro, Alexandre Quintart, Sergio Fraile Izquierdo, Joseph C. Ferguson

An extension of Slicer using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to aid the segmentation of 3D data from tomography or other imaging techniques.

Computational Materials Science 2023

Simulation toolkit for digital material characterization of large image-based microstructures

Authors: Pedro C.F. Lopes, Rafael S. Vianna, Victor W. Sapucaia, Federico Semeraro, Ricardo Leiderman, André M.B. Pereira

An image-based simulation CUDA toolkit for material characterization using Finite Element numerical methods to compute the effective thermal conductivity, elasticity, and permeability.

SoftwareX 2021

Porous Microstructure Analysis (PuMA)

Authors: Joseph C. Ferguson, Federico Semeraro, John M. Thornton, Francesco Panerai, Arnaud Borner, Nagi N. Mansour

PuMA was developed to compute effective material properties and perform material response simulations on 3D microstrutural images obtained from X-ray tomography.

AIAA SciTech 2021

Multi-Scale Analysis of Effective Mechanical Properties of Porous 3D Woven Composite Materials

Authors: Sergio Fraile Izquierdo, Federico Semeraro and Marcos Acín

Computation and analysis of the mechanical properties of 3D woven composite materials that share the same yarn structure but differ in their matrix porosity and yarn's fiber volume fraction.

Computational Materials Science 2021

Anisotropic analysis of fibrous and woven materials part 2: Computation of effective conductivity

Authors: Federico Semeraro, Joseph C. Ferguson, Marcos Acin, Francesco Panerai, Nagi N. Mansour

Numerical finite volume method to compute the effective thermal conductivity of 3D microstructures obtained from tomograhy, accounting for the anisotropy of the constituent phases.

Computational Materials Science 2020

Anisotropic analysis of fibrous and woven materials part 1: Estimation of local orientation

Authors: Federico Semeraro, Joseph C. Ferguson, Francesco Panerai, Robert J. King, Nagi N. Mansour

Three techniques to estimate the local orientation of fibrous microstructures obtained from tomography scanning: a common image processing technique called structure tensor, a method based on artificial flux, and a novel ray-casting approach

University

OMS CS7643 Deep Learning - arXiv 2023

NeRF applied to satellite imagery for surface reconstruction

Authors: Federico Semeraro, Yi Zhang, Wenying Wu, Patrick Carroll

Surf-NeRF, a method to synthesize novel views from a sparse set of satellite images of a scene as well as its surface elevation, while accounting for the variation in lighting present in the pictures.

OMS CS6476 Computer Vision

Stereo Correspondence using Graph-Cuts

Two techniques to perform stereo correspondence: a simple method based on SSD and a graph cut algorithm. The performance of both method was benchmarked against the Middlebury image database of rectified stereo image pairs.

OMS CS6475 Computational Photography

Video Stabilization using L1 optimal camera paths

An automatic video stabilizer relying on the estimation of the original camera path through the detection of features between video frames and the computation of the similarity transformation between them.

Internships

blender2dirsig

Automated the creation of 3D synthetic scenes during the summer internship at Planet Labs (2022) for the DIRSIG image generation model using Blender scripting.

Copper Tracker

Developed algorithms during the summer internship at Earth-i (2017) to correlate copper ore extraction data with features observable from space, tracked using Convolutional Neural Networks.

LiMA Flight Tracker

Developed app using R during the year-long internship in the Data Science department at Airbus UK (2015-2016). The objective was to analyze aircraft movements through FlightRadar24 and predict maintenance stops.

Personal

ESA NEMESYS Bexus

Designed the structure of a student experiment (NEMESYS Bexus) flown on a stratospheric balloon by the European Space Agency to study the effect of particle impacts on memory boards.

Water Brigade - Ghana 2014

Joined a brigade organized by Imperial College London traveling to a village in Ghana with no access to potable water, with the aim of designing and implementing water systems to prevent water-related illnesses.