Antonio Terpin

I am an aspiring full-stack scientist, currently as a PhD student with Raff D'Andrea and Simone Schürle at ETH Zürich. Ever since I was a kid, I have been broadly interested in computer science, physics, robotics and mathematical puzzles. I love science and engineering.

I completed my M.Sc. in Robotics, Systems and Control from ETH Zürich in 2023 with a focus on optimization and optimal transport. For my work I was awarded ETH medal, Willi Studer Prize, and the ASRO/SVO award.

I used to play football, now I enjoy running (marathon time: 3h 30 min), cycling (on the Alps), skying, and much more. But I recently got obsessed with Bachata... Otherwise, I like to read, and build things.

works

Cooking... 🧪, 🌊, 🤖

Biology and healthcare

Learning diffusion at lightspeed NeurIPS 2024 (oral, top .39%)
A. Terpin, N. Lanzetti, M. Gadea, F. Dörfler

Robotics

Path planning for UAV in warehouses US patent 2024
A. Terpin, T. Horvat, M. Hehn

Optimization and control

Optimality of Linear Policies for DR-LQG Preprint 2024
N. Lanzetti*, A. Terpin*, F. Dörfler
Variational Analysis in the Wasserstein Space Preprint 2024
L. Nicolas*, A. Terpin*, F. Dörfler
Dynamic Programming in Probability Spaces via Optimal Transport SIAM SICON 2023
A. Terpin*, N. Lanzetti*, F. Dörfler
Trust Region Policy Optimization with Optimal Transport NeurIPS 2022
A. Terpin*, N. Lanzetti*, B. Yardim, F. Dörfler, G. Ramponi
Distributed Feedback Optimisation for Robotic Coordination ACC 2022
A. Terpin, S. Fricker, M. Perez, M. Hudoba de Badyn, and F. Dörfler

* equal contribution.

I squeezed in various internships and freelancing projects during my studies:

[2020-] I have been involved in teaching activities.
[2022] Verity's inventory management system uses self-flying drones to create true zero-error warehouses. There, I:
- Improved the path planning algorithms, yielding up to x10-100 speed up (C++).
- Developed support tools for the deployment team, reducing the number of related tickets by 50% (Python).
[2021] I worked at the Robotics and Perception Group with Daniel Gehrig and Davide Scaramuzza on the open sourcing of an event-based visual odometry pipeline
[2018] Inuru's patented electronic films enables electronic labels and packaging for consumer marketing. There, I:
- Designed and implemented the algorithm to automate the design of the electronic circuit (Java, AWS).
- Implemented the backend for the web application to input the packaging information (Java, AWS)
[2017] I worked at ISEL on a Java application dedicated to the problem of medical support in the area of nephrology diagnostic, more specifically on the Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) diagnosis.

I also did some freelancing; some examples:

[2019] PlanetAutomation, Udine: I developed the web service (NodeJS, AWS) for scheduling and tracking the maintenances on industrial machines.
[2018] BLE beacons for indoor navigation: I developed the software infrastructure (NodeJS, AWS, Kotlin) for an indoor navigation system based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons technology. The system has been deployed during a local event in Brașov, Romania.
[2018] Torneo delle frazioni di Buia, Udine: I developed an Android (Java) app to handle and support a yearly football tournament in Udine, Italy, with backend based on AWS (S3, Cognito, Lambda).
[2017] Vodafone EICMA eBike, Udine: I developed the Android application for the moto presented by Vodafone at EICMA 2017 (Java).

pet projects

... I will slowly add all the others ...

LLM misc. Some random projects I worked on with LLMs: A chrome extension to turn your conversations with ChatGPT into flashcards, a let me google that for you powered by LLM.

Computer Vision misc. In 2021 I worked at the Robotics and Perception Group with Daniel Gehrig and Davide Scaramuzza on the open sourcing of an event-based visual odometry pipeline. Prior to that, I built a visual odometry pipeline from scratch in Matlab with Antonio Arbues (2020), and a steel defect detector using wavelets and bayesian optimization with Claudio Verardo (2019, mostly to play with wavelets).

Virtual Reality misc. In 2018 I worked on some VR projects during the Uqido academy of immersive technologies. We built a VR physiotherapist and an Alice in wonderland scene... But what got me excited the most was CUDA... pretty cool stuff. :)

Trivia Patente In high school (2016-2018), with Luigi Donadel and Gabriel Ciulei, we built an app to prepare for the Italian driving license theory exam by playing with your friends. We were bored of studying the theory exam, and we thought this would have made it easier... iOS app in Swift, Android app in Java, backend in Python, and many cool javascript daemons for when we had no users, lol. (we got to 100, eventually... lesson: iterate with your customers!)

Java misc. In high school (2015-2016) I built many random (looking back, cute) projects to learn Java: a computer graphic simulation of the iconic race between the turtle and the hare (open to bets!), a 2-players maze game (meant to play with my niece), an enigma machine (after I saw the imitation game), a chat server with some extra features, a barebone search engine, ... of most of the other projects I lost the code, sadly. I talked about these projects in this twitter thread.

bookshelf

I think reading is one of the best thing you can do. I started to collect my reading picks for each year, but I figured I could simply collect all (approximately) the books I own in this page (work in progress...).

I have not read all of these, and I highlighted in green then ones I particularly enjoyed for a reason or another. They are listed in no particular order.

reading picks

2024 Elementary fluid dynamics (Acheson), The art of doing science and engineering (Hamming), Biology (Campbell), Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (Stanley, Lehman), Lessons of History (Durant). Tweet.

2023 Optimization by Vector Space methods (Luenberger), Variational Analysis (Rockafellar), Gradient Flows (Ambrosio, Gigli and Savaré), The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Allen), Entangled Life (Sheldrake), How To Be a Founder (Bentinck), The defining decade (Jay), Radical Candor (Scott). Tweet.

bookmarks

A Stroke of Genius: Striving for Greatness in All You Do
Paul Graham essays
The argmin blog (inactive) and the argmin substack
Andrej Karpathy writings
The days are long but the decades are short by Sam Altman

Founders
Generally Intelligent
... but I rarely listen to podcast/music nowadays, I prefer thinking/doing nothing.

Some other online material I liked:

teaching

I am continuously looking for motivated students interested in working with me. Feel free to reach out with your transcripts and a brief description of a project you have worked on.

Completed projects:

Martin Gadea, Learning diffusion at lightspeed: An application to single-cell dynamics prediction. (2023)
Martin's work was part of the Learning diffusion at lightspeed project, which resulted in a oral at NeurIPS 2024 (top .39%).

Teaching positions:

Head TA for the ETH Zürich class Programming and Optimal Control (2023-2024) by Raff. I was responsible for the material, exercises, and exam. Some tweets on the content: Value Iteration vs Policy Iteration, and Linear Programming, the Viterbi algorithm, Label Correcting Algorithms to solve Shortest Path Problems. The exam was taken by 200+ students. I worked with an amazing team of students:
- Alain Schöbi (2023)
- Philip Pawlowsky (2023-2024)
- Cara Koepele (2023)
- Maximilian Stralz (2024)
- Nicola Taddei (2024)
Teaching Assistant for the ETH Zürich class Applied Compositional Thinking for Engineers I (2023) and II (2022) by Andrea Censi.
Teaching Assistant for the ETH Zürich class Linear System Theory (2021).
Teaching Assistant for the ETH Zürich class Control Systems (2021) by Florian.
Teaching Assistant for the Linear Algebra class (2020) in Udine.

awards and prizes

SVOR/ASRO Award (2024) for my master thesis on Optimization in Wasserstein Spaces.
Willi Studer Prize (2023) as top graduate in the Robotics, Systems and Control MSc (GPA: 6.0/6.0).
ETH Medal (2023) for my master thesis on Optimization in Wasserstein Spaces.
NeurIPS Scholar Award (2022).
Student Travel Grant for the American Control Conference (2022).
Among the four winners of the national-level selection contest for the Superiore dell'Università di Udine, awarded a five years full scholarship (2018).
Best student award at ITST JF Kennedy, Pordenone (2014, 2015, 2017).
Enlisted in the excelence records of the Italian Ministry of Education (2017).
Sport and School award at ITST JF Kennedy, Pordenone (2015).