About

I work as a neural data analyst at the Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience lab of the University of Amsterdam, led by Cyriel Pennartz. I split my time between crunching multi-unit electrophysiology data and providing support on sofware and data analysis methods to PhD projects in the lab.

Pietro's Data Bulletin and other sciency stuff

As our ability to probe brain activity increases at an incredible pace, the statistical and data analysis tools common to neuroscience often lag behind, and are left to catch up with the ever-increasing size and complexity of our datasets. And even when the right tools are already out there, they are often not as popular and as widely adopted as the more conventional and less powerful alternatives.

Motivated by this thought, a few months ago I started spamming my colleagues with a series of emails on new-ish developments in the world of statistics and data science which are directly applicable to our research at the lab. Since nobody protested against the spam, and a few colleagues were even so kind as to encourage this effort, I kept writing on these topics every now and then. The resulting newsletter can now be found here, under the unimaginative name of Pietro's Data Bulletin. I make a conscious effort to try and limit the number of bad puns in my posts, but some may have slipped through.

Longer posts with some sort of didactic intention will be collected in the tutorials section.

Non-sciency stuff

When I'm not trying to figure out how the brain works, I can mostly be found serving beers and screening old Italian films at Cinema of the Dam'd, a lovely little independent cinema, part of Amsterdam's historic squat OT301. Over the years, I have also recorded and published electronic music under the name Piet Row, you can check out my channel and listen to the full records on bandcamp. More recently, I have been collaborating with director Giovanni Bolzani Valenzano, producing the soundtrack of his gorgeous short film LUNA. You should also take a look at his video for my song you're not alone anymore.