My role: co-founder and Chief Research Officer, since 2023.
motus ml s.r.l. S.B. is an academic spin-off of Politecnico di Milano, founded to bring the industrial results of my research on Streaming Machine Learning, Streaming Continual Learning and Time Series Analysis to the space and manufacturing sectors. It develops AI solutions for physical systems: on-board processing of satellite data and AI-based quality control of space-grade electronics, for customers such as Leonardo and Thales Alenia Space.
The company is led by two of my former PhD students: Giacomo Ziffer as CEO and Alessio Bernardo as CTO. Today the team counts around 15 people. In September 2026 the company won the Satellite Data Use – Downstream award at BEX, the Beyond Exploration Expo.
What we do
We build AI that runs where the physical world sets the rules: on board satellites, on the ground alongside mission operations, and inside the engineering workflows and production lines of high-reliability manufacturing. Not a layer bolted onto a finished system, but part of how that system works, responds and evolves.
Two results I am proud of. Our onboard ship detection runs in real time on a space-grade Zynq board, with inference 95.7% faster and latency under half a millisecond over a 2.5 × 2.5 km area — a satellite that recognises ships as it passes over them, instead of sending everything home to be looked at later. And in manufacturing, our root-cause diagnosis of production defects is forty times faster than the process it supports, running in production today. We have also demonstrated end-to-end on-board SAR processing with AI-based ship detection on Aresys’ space-grade board.