Francesco Piccinno
Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolFrancesco Piccinno is a Staff Research Scientist and manager at Google DeepMind in Zurich with 18 years of experience bridging applied security tooling and cutting-edge multimodal AI. He leads work on the Gemini Multimodal team after a long tenure as a research and software engineer at Google, bringing deep expertise in semi-structured models for QA and semantic parsing. Francesco earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pisa focused on entity linking and compressed data structures for large labeled graphs, and holds a summa-cum-laude MS in Computer Science and Networking. Early-career contributions to open-source network security projects—like PacketManipulator and work on the BlackArch distribution—reflect practical skills in packet crafting, wireless analysis, and protocol injection. He combines rigorous academic foundations with hands-on systems and security engineering, uniquely able to translate research into production ML systems. Colleagues value his blend of technical depth, operational security experience, and mentorship in high-stakes research environments.
18 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
University of MilanMS, Computer Science and Networking, 110/110 cum laude, MS, Computer Science and Networking, 110/110 cum laude at Scuola Superiore 'Sant' Anna' di Studi Universitari e di PerfezionamentoDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science at Università di Pisa
English, Italian
Github Skills (13)
packet-analysis10
network-security10
linux10
ws-security10
penetration-testing10
wireshark10
network-protocol10
network-analysis10
wifi-security10
scripting9
shell9
script9
sh9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
BlackArch/blackarch
Mar 2009 - Aug 2010
An ArchLinux based distribution for penetration testers and security researchers.
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:579 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Francesco contributed to an ArchLinux-based penetration testing and security research distribution. Their work involved adding and modifying scripts related to Cisco router configuration, indicating an interest in network security and penetration testing. The commits also include the integration of wireless tools such as kismet-earth and a refreshed LKM skeleton, focusing on wireless network analysis and potentially kernel-level security research. The user also worked with wireshark injection tools demonstrating network protocol analysis and manipulation skills.
security-researcherssecuritypenetrationtesterspenetration-testing
nopper/twittomatic
Nov 2012 - Dec 2013
Distributed twitter crawler in Python
Contributions:78 commits in 1 year
pythontwitter-crawlerpython3twittercrawler
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