Massimiliano Pontil

Massimiliano Pontil is Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), where he leads the Computational Statistics and Machine Learning unit, and co-director of the ELLIS Unit Genoa, a joint initiative of IIT and the University of Genoa. He is also Professor of Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at University College London and a member of the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence. His research addresses the statistical and algorithmic foundations of machine learning, with contributions to kernel methods, multitask and transfer learning, sparsity regularization, learning of dynamical systems, algorithm fairness, and hyperparameter optimization. He has authored over 200 papers in leading international journals and conferences, cited over 18,000 times (h-index 62, Scopus, November 2025). He has received a number of international awards (including the ICML 2013 Best Paper Runner-Up Award and an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship) and has played an active role in the scientific community through programme committees (COLT, ICML, NeurIPS), editorial boards (MLJ, JMLR), and advisory roles at major research institutions. He has held visiting positions at several universities and research institutes, including the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, ENSAE Paris, École Polytechnique, MIT, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.