I am a postdoctoral researcher at Data Intensive Applications & Systems Laboratory (DIAS) led by professor Anastasia Ailamaki.

My interests are:

• GPU-accelerated databases
• storage in data management systems
• encoding and indexing integer / string / time series / textual files
• lossless compression algorithms

My research focuses on making modern data systems faster and more efficient by co-designing data layouts, indexes, execution engines, and hardware-conscious optimizations.

Previously I was a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa 🇮🇹, where I was member of the A³ lab led by professor Paolo Ferragina.

Publications

• Hamish Nicholson, Konstantinos Chasialis, Antonio Boffa, and Anastasia Ailamaki. 2025. The Effectiveness of Compression for GPU-Accelerated Queries on Out-of-Memory Datasets. In Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware (DaMoN ‘25). Association for Computing Machinery https://doi.org/10.1145/3736227.3736240 PDF

• Antonio Boffa, Roberto Di Cosmo, Paolo Ferragina, Andrea Guerra, Giovanni Manzini, Giorgio Vinciguerra, Stefano Zacchiroli (2025). On the compressibility of large-scale source code datasets. Journal of Systems and Software https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2025.112429 PDF

• Andrea Guerra, Giorgio Vinciguerra, Antonio Boffa, Paolo Ferragina (2025). Learned compression of nonlinear time series with random access. 2025 IEEE 41st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). 10.1109/ICDE65448.2025.00122 PDF

• Antonio Boffa (2024). Designing new compressed data structures using data-aware approaches PhD thesis.

• Antonio Boffa, Paolo Ferragina, Francesco Tosoni, Giorgio Vinciguerra (2024). CoCo-trie: Data-aware compression and indexing of strings. Information Systems. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2023.102316. PDF

• Antonio Boffa, Paolo Ferragina, Francesco Tosoni, Giorgio Vinciguerra (2022). Compressed string dictionaries via data-aware subtrie compaction. String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20643-6_17. PDF

• Antonio Boffa, Paolo Ferragina, Giorgio Vinciguerra (2022). A learned approach to design compressed rank/select data structures. ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG). https://doi.org/10.1145/3524060. PDF

• Antonio Boffa, Paolo Ferragina, Giorgio Vinciguerra (2021). A “learned” approach to quicken and compress rank/select dictionaries. In Proceedings of the SIAM Symposium on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX). https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611976472.4. PDF

• Anna Bernasconi, Antonio Boffa, Fabrizio Luccio, Linda Pagli. (2019) The Connection Layout in a Lattice of Four-Terminal Switches. Design and Engineering of Electronics Systems Based on New Computing Paradigms. VLSI-SoC 2018. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 561. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23425-6_3. PDF

• Anna Bernasconi, Antonio Boffa, Fabrizio Luccio, Linda Pagli. (2018) Two Combinatorial Problems on the Layout of Switching Lattices. Proc. 26th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration” (VLSI-SOC) https://doi.org/10.1109/VLSI-SoC.2018.8644855. PDF

Experiences

• Postdoctoral researcher at DIAS lab (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)), Lausanne, Switzerland 🇨🇭.

  15/05/2024 - On going

• Visiting PhD Student at DasLab (Harvard SEAS John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), Boston, Massachusetts, USA 🇺🇸.

  01/04/2023 – 30/06/2023

  Conduct research activities focused on designing, implementing, and testing new data-aware approximate range filters against adversarial queries. The goal is to incorporate these range filters to real world LSM-tree based key-value stores like RocksDB.

• Software Developer Engineer Intern at Amazon AWS Redshift, Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪.

  Design, implement and test new theoretically grounded solutions to select the compression encodings for the columns of the tables inside a petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse (Redshift/Spectrum).

  01/07/2021 – 31/10/2021

• Exchange student Erasmus program at University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 🇫🇮.

  01/01/2019 – 01/06/2019

Services

Open-source contribution

• ClickHouse: Identified, reproduced, and reported a confirmed bug in QBit vector search that caused incorrect distance computations and near-zero recall in the official release; issue #89976 was fixed upstream in PR #90485.

Reviewer:

• Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 26)
• ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
• Proceedings of the VLDB Volume 19 (VLDB 2026)
• Journal of Supercomputing
• PLOS ONE 2024
• Data Compression Conference (DCC 2023)
• Symposium on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX 2023)

Teaching & Supervision

Head Teaching Assistant, EPFL

• 01/02/2026 – On going. Course: CS-300 Data-intensive systems
• 01/02/2025 – 31/07/2025 Course: CS-300 Data-intensive systems

Teaching Assistant, University of Pisa, Computer Science:

• 01/10/2023 – 30/01/2024 Course: Programming Lab II (2023/2024)

• 01/10/2022 – 30/01/2023 Course: Programming Lab II (2022/2023)

• 01/10/2021 – 30/01/2022 Course: Programming Lab II (2021/2022)

• 17/02/2020 – 15/07/2020 Course: Algorithms and laboratory (2019/2020)

Co-supervised theses:

• André Espírito Santo. Explore techniques to scale HNSW vector indexes with workload knowledge, Master Thesis @ Oracle Zurich
• Amey Kulkarni. GRASS: A Graph Serialization Framework for Querying and Visualizing Database Internal State, Master Thesis @ Oracle Zurich

Awards

Winner of the abroad study period scholarship 2023 from Fondazione ISSNAF (Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation)

Volunteering

Erasmus Student Network (ESN) is the biggest European association of university students, whose purpose is to promote and support international mobility exchanges between students. I’m a proud Honorary Member of ESN Pisa.