Melissa received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2023 at the University of Bologna, where she was part of the FOCUS group. Her doctoral research focused on logical foundations of randomised computation and was supervised by Ugo Dal Lago and co-supervised by Paolo Pistone. She currently works as a post-doctoral researcher at HIIT, in the focus area Foundations of Computing.
Broadly speaking, Melissa’s research concerns interactions between logic and theoretical computer science, with a special attention to proof theory, modal logic and computational complexity theory. At the moment, she is working on the (logical and implicit) characterizations of probabilistic and circuit complexity classes. Her research is supervised by Mikko Koivisto and Juha Kontinen, and is conducted in collaboration with Arnaud Durand.
Sample of publications
[1] Melissa Antonelli, Arnaud Durand, Juha Kontinen. 2025. Circuit Complexity Meets Discrete Ordinary Differential Equations: An Overview. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Formal Verification, Logic, Automata, and Synthesis (CEUR Workshop proceedings; Vol. 4142). CEUR-WS.org.
[2] Melissa Antonelli, Arnaud Durand, Juha Kontinen. 2025. Towards new characterizations of small circuit classes via discrete ordinary differential equations. Theoretical Computer Science, 1062(2), Article 115655.
[3] Melissa Antonelli, Arnaud Durand, Juha Kontinen. 2025. Characterizing Small Circuit Classes from FAC^0 to FAC^1 via Discrete Ordinary Differential Equations. In Proceedings of 50th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2025) ( Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs); Vol. 345). Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik.