Andrea Montaldo

Working out whether an energy community is worthwhile — for an apartment building as for a public administration — takes energy, regulatory and economic expertise all at once, and almost none of the people involved have it. For DICAAR I built the platform that walks you from energy literacy to techno-economic evaluation (rec-up.it). It combines an educational CMS with visual storytelling, an interactive isometric narrative on the birth of a REC, a playable simulator for exploring energy and decision dynamics, and a calculation engine for realistic simulations of production, self-consumption, energy flows, incentives and payback over multi-year horizons.

A modular, scalable architecture built for reuse in different territories, with strong attention to UX, accessibility and the translation of complex models into readable visualizations.

The same text does not reach every reader: for someone with dyslexia, a cognitive disability, or who is still learning the language, the page as it stands remains a barrier. For Ultrablu I am building the ecosystem (universal design, multimedia, artificial intelligence) that makes the same content usable at several levels (ultraleggibili.it): visual reading with pictograms and audio, simplified text with contextual annotations, a typographically faithful rendering of the original, assisted paraphrase. Each level comes with advanced personalization (typography, colors, highlighting, text-to-speech) to reduce cognitive load.

A hybrid architecture with a reactive application, dedicated APIs, single and bulk text-to-speech, editorial tools for multi-level content and AI reading-support components, in the service of educational publishing.

Behind the scenes, an international conference is an operational flow that usually fragments across external services and spreadsheets: registrations, fees, abstracts, bookings, invoicing. For the Annual Conference & General Meeting of the European Association for Architectural Education, hosted by the University of Cagliari, I built the website and management system that gather everything into a single place (eaaecagliari2026.it). Beyond the editorial sections (program, keynotes, tours, accommodation), the platform handles:

• Wizard-based registration with per-category fees and an early-bird window, tour and Gala Dinner booking with seat and sold-out management, dietary requirements and billing details.
• A call for abstracts with thematic sessions, co-authors, length limits checked in real time and PDF uploads.
• Transactional emails, CSV exports for the secretariat, data migration between system versions and anti-spam protections.

Student orientation almost always means frontal presentations, which a visiting student forgets in a hurry. For the Villa Satta Open Day I turned choosing a course into a game: four riddles, one per degree course, scattered across the campus and reached via QR codes. Each station is a web app with art direction dedicated to the course's identity: a procedurally generated floor-plan maze for Interior Design, an editorial game of slogans and audiences for Communication, a pixel-art arcade for Media Design, a tactile experience about fabrics for Fashion. The digits collected at the stations open the padlock on the treasure chest. Concept, game design, dependency-free development tested on low-end devices, graphics for the game materials and production coordination.

A community photo archive survives only if it does not depend on the software hosting it: if the metadata live in a separate database, sooner or later they get lost. I built the bilingual website of this experiential house museum (domantiglia.it) — cultural events, workshops and hospitality — around that principle and around the community's historical photo archive, over 4,000 images. The metadata travel inside the files: a purpose-built XMP/IPTC parser, dual master/web copies and automatic write-back of editorial changes into the original JPEG, so the archive remains self-supporting even outside the CMS. Access by "fonds" with layered visibility (public, on-site consultation), an infinite-scroll gallery with lightbox, batch imports from the command line, and a generative logo redrawn on every visit with Perlin noise.

Energy communities are taking root across Sardinia, but anyone trying to understand what they are, where they are and how to start finds information scattered between technical and institutional sources. For the Department of Humanities, Languages and Cultural Heritage I built the platform that brings them together, focused on Sardinia (emc2cer.it): an interactive map of the communities with filters, search and clustering, fed automatically by the official GSE APIs and by collaborative maps, with incremental updates of the points; a glossary of over sixty terms in five languages (Italian, English, Spanish, French, Chinese) with fuzzy search; an interactive branching guide for citizens, institutions, installers and facilitators; automatic monitoring of calls and regulations from more than eighteen institutional sources, with relevance-based classification of the news.

A faculty website ages at the speed of its events: if updating it is a chore, it stops being updated. For the Faculty of Architecture in Cagliari I built a platform designed first of all for the people who tend it (architetturacagliari.it): featured events with multi-day scheduling, an interactive monthly calendar, an archive of research groups with detail pages, photo galleries and attachments, dynamic search and filters. WordPress with a custom child theme and Bootstrap 5, optimized event-retrieval queries, deferred loading of images and scripts, mobile-first design and accessibility built with ARIA labels.

A newsroom working with data has to read more news than one person could ever open. ANNA, which I designed and developed with Deweave, builds its own repository from a list of web sources and keywords, and supports the entire analysis cycle on a scalable data lake: continuous near-real-time ingestion, enrichment, exploration and modeling.

• Bias-free topic modeling (NMF, cosine similarity, single-linkage clustering) with automatic naming of topics.
• Automatic summarization (SBS and DBS), NER trained on custom deep learning models, ranking with BM25 variants of tf-idf, full-text search with a GIST index.
• Analytics on the popularity of topics and stories, influencers, trends and outliers, with timelines and chronological maps.
• RESTful APIs for integration into existing platforms such as Truly Media and TruthNest.

The region's tourism data lived in heterogeneous APIs, with uneven quality and no interface designed for travellers. For the official Sardegna Turismo app (App Store, Google Play) I designed and implemented the data middleware and the technical foundation that make them usable: ETL for migrating and cleaning data from the regional APIs, a GraphQL layer (Hasura) on PostgreSQL/PostGIS with custom procedures and business logic in PL/pgSQL, JWT authentication.

• Natural-language search with real-time, error-tolerant autocomplete, relevance ranking and snippet extraction.
• A geospatial engine with proximity queries and large-scale clustering of points of interest.
• A recommendation system with low-rank matrix factorization and cold-start mitigation.
• A media pipeline on AWS (S3, CloudFront, Elastic Transcoder, Lambda) provisioned with Terraform; native React Native + Apollo frontend; self-installing Docker environments.

Italy's State Budget is a document almost no one manages to read — not even those who have to vote on it. For the State General Accounting Department I designed the concept and prototype of a semantic engine that answers spoken questions about the Atti Dovuti: it interprets the request, computes the figure and returns it wherever it is needed (web, mobile, voice, augmented reality, kiosks), through three types of interaction (phygital, AI-driven, pattern-driven), safeguarding the security and integrity of the sources. The service is designed for Members of Parliament during the approval process and, downstream, for citizens, media and the specialized press.

Measuring how ready European open science really is, country by country, required indicators collected in dozens of different ways. For the federated EOSC ecosystem I designed the PoC of the dashboard that unifies them: tool selection, automatic and manual data-collection workflows, active monitoring and reporting processes, transparency and actionability mechanisms, beta testing with the national organizations and validation workshops. All the software developed was released under an open source license; the work is documented on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.5595779).

A news outlet run by students changes its newsroom every year: the platform has to withstand the turnover without losing editorial quality. For the LUISS Master in Journalism and Communication I designed and developed Zeta's architecture (zetaluiss.it): articles, in-depth features, news bulletins, radio and podcasts, with services delivered in the cloud on open source technologies. Zeta adapts to the importance of the news and to the style set by the journalists through an AI-driven model based on metadata and tags, and integrates Alexa with AI-based voice conversation models.

The user data a company accumulates stays inert until it becomes segments to act on. Jakala's platform turns large volumes of data (first-, second- and third-party) into activatable audiences: collection from structured and unstructured sources, processing with custom Python ETL, analysis on ClickHouse and Metabase. The programmatic buying function delivers target audience, message, channels and devices to advertisers.

Knowing how much a topic is talked about on social media is easy; understanding who drives it, how it spreads and with what sentiment is another craft. With Deweave I built the data intelligence service that monitors, analyzes and interprets the streams of the major social networks in near real time: sentiment analysis, network analysis of the relationships between topics and individuals, volumetric analytics, activity and popularity trends, key topics and degree of engagement. A distributed infrastructure (ClickHouse for OLAP analysis, MongoDB, GlusterFS) with databases of billions of rows and about one billion tweets analyzed. Recorded in Italy's special public registry for computer programs (SIAE, 2019).

A "compass" to steer newsrooms and the public away from contaminated sources, crucial during emergencies and breaking news. Each story's assessment combines three signals: source credibility analysis (reputation, track record, cross-confirmation), user voting on how the story is perceived, and NLP semantic analysis of the content (overly emotional language, lack of verifiable sources, sensationalist headlines). I coordinated the development team and curated data visualization dashboards and editorial products.

In the data flows between people and machines there is implicit knowledge that usually no one extracts. DEEP was the research project that tried: new models and algorithms for analyzing textual and visual streams, a prototype platform for big data analysis and real-time forecasting, algorithms for data journalism and data visualization systems. My main contribution: the privacy-preserving recommendation system for e-commerce.

Energy you don't measure is energy you can't manage. Joule is an ecosystem for smart metering, consumption monitoring and forecasting integrated with the Joule 4.0 suite, in a cloud architecture on Google services and open source engines: sensors, meters, signal aggregators and smart objects collect data following IoT paradigms, for domestic and industrial installations. I worked on the design and integration of hardware and software, on the analysis and forecasting algorithms, and on the security and reliability of the system.

Away from the therapist's practice, rehabilitation exercises are often performed badly, and no one notices until they cause harm. GymHelper monitors joint movements through cameras and machine learning, with real-time feedback for users and a web/app interface for therapists. The system finds patterns in the data (the exercises most often performed incorrectly and their correlations with gender, age and health conditions; improvement with assisted execution; the body parts most exposed to stress and injury) and sends alerts when an exercise is performed wrongly, limiting injuries and costs.

Three industrial research projects, one same question: what happens when emerging technologies (big data, blockchain, distributed ledgers) meet real commercial processes.

• NextShop, an all-encompassing approach to e-commerce: a data- and mobile-driven omnichannel concept store, customer profiling on big data platforms for predictive procurement, payment systems and security in 4.0 transactions.
• ProtectID, blockchain in industrial processes and services: pervasive identity & trust for e-commerce, decentralized apps, cryptocurrency in support of mobile payments. Includes the "Machine Learning aggregator" demonstrator (D-All project): collecting an e-commerce site's information, aggregating it by topic, automatic summaries and review KPIs through NLP and topic modeling.
• SON · Secure Open Nets: distributed-ledger methodologies and prototypes applied to privacy, the sharing economy and copyright.

Food and wine tourism is made of small, disconnected actors: producers, territories, travellers who never meet. INMOTO explored web and mobile platforms to make them interact: promotion of food and wine products with multimedia information and geolocation, personalized discovery routes, dynamic e-commerce on the move, Google Glass applications for new tourist itineraries, algorithms for automatic and interactive route computation.

No spectator has ever seen the opera through the eyes of those singing it. For Puccini's Turandot, Google Glass went on stage: the scenes as seen by the protagonists, streamed live, the melodrama extended to the cloud, social media and live tweeting. I worked on optimizing the network processes and the encoding for the streaming broadcast.

Press coverage: The Guardian · The New York Times · Huffington Post · Il Fatto Quotidiano

Emerging musicians can't find stages; venues don't know where to look for them. The website SIAE — the Italian authors' and publishers' society — conceived for musicians under 31 brings them together: a concert calendar with a royalty discount for the venues hosting them, track and video uploads, voting and favorites, backend content moderation. I handled the analysis and design of the UX, the high-traffic infrastructure and the physical and logical architecture.

Cultural professionals in Asia and Europe work on two continents that know little of each other. culture360 is the portal through which the Asia-Europe Foundation keeps them in touch (culture360.asef.org): news, events, opportunities, a magazine with in-depth features and networking across the ASEM region; since 2011 it has also hosted the website of the Asia-Europe Museum Network. Built in Drupal with highly scalable Docker environments. The assignment in Singapore included workshops with users from different cultural contexts (card sorting and UX interviews) for a universal, inclusive user experience beyond cultural barriers.

Engagement on social media rarely becomes concrete help. theShukran tried: a social network animated by young people of many nationalities, many of them second-generation Europeans, where through EthicNow users award the "golden shukran" — a monetary donation — to the humanitarian programs in competition. iOS and Android apps in Node.js on AWS with auto scaling; as co-founder I handled the analysis and design of the UX, the high-traffic infrastructure and the physical and logical architecture.