Nicola Procopio
Senior Data & AI Scientist
Calabria, Italy
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicola Procopio is a Senior Data & AI Scientist with a decade of experience applying machine learning, statistics and graph analysis to real-world products and research. He has led data science teams and R&D initiatives across healthcare, enterprise and innovation hubs, specializing in semantic search, NLU, vector databases and LLM-driven retrieval applications. An active open-source contributor, Nicola has contributed hybrid search, embedding and document-processing enhancements to the widely used Haystack framework, improving retrieval performance and pipeline robustness. He blends rigorous academic training—an Applied Statistics master's with magna cum laude—with hands-on engineering, from ETL and GIS to production-ready AI modules. Based in Calabria, Italy, he combines dissemination and advocacy with pragmatic product delivery, and is known for translating graph-theory and social-network analysis insights into scalable ML solutions.
10 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Applied Statistics, magna cum laude, Master's degree, Applied Statistics, magna cum laude at Università degli Studi della Calabria
Italian, English, French, lingua dei segni
Github Skills (19)
transformers10
python10
large-language-models10
retrieval-augmented-generation10
natural-language-processing10
nlp10
embedding10
haystack10
amazon-elasticsearch9
machine-learning9
azure-openai9
aws-elasticsearch9
ai9
elasticsearchquery9
elasticsearch-api9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
deepset-ai/haystack
Sep 2022 - Mar 2025
Open-source AI orchestration framework for building context-engineered, production-ready LLM applications. Design modular pipelines and agent workflows with explicit control over retrieval, routing, memory, and generation. Built for scalable agents, RAG, multimodal applications, semantic search, and conversational systems.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:5 reviews, 9 PRs, 30 comments in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Nicola primarily contributed to the development and enhancement of the Haystack framework, focusing on features related to hybrid search, embeddings, and document processing. They implemented examples and pipelines demonstrating hybrid search capabilities and improved existing examples. Furthermore, they added functionalities such as dimension parameters for Azure OpenAI embedders and distribution-based rank fusion, demonstrating a focus on improving retrieval methods and performance. The user also fixed bugs and refactored code related to join operations and document splitting within the framework.
aillmmultimodalorchestration-frameworksemantic-search
nickprock/pynuTS
Feb 2021 - Nov 2021
A python library for unsupervised time series analysis
Contributions:4 releases, 3 reviews, 115 commits in 8 months
pythontime-seriesunsupervised-learning
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