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 effort of IIT and the University of Genoa. He is also Professor of Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at University College London and member of the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence. He has made significant contributions to machine learning, particularly in the areas of kernel methods, multitask and transfer learning, sparsity regularization and statistical learning theory. Recent interests include meta-learning, algorithm fairness, hyperparameter optimization, and learning dynamical systems. He was awarded the Best Paper Runner Up Award from ICML 2013, an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship in 2006-2011, and the Edoardo R. Caianiello Award for the Best Italian PhD Thesis on Connectionism in 2002.  He has published about 200 papers at international journals and conferences. His research papers have been cited over 16,000 times and his h-index is 56 (source Scopus, August 2024). He is regularly on the programme committee of the main machine learning conferences (COLT, ICML and NeurIPS), has been on the editorial board of the Machine Learning Journal, Statistics and Computing, JMLR, and was on the Scientific Advisory Board of Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems during 2013-2020. He has held visiting positions at a number of universities and research institutes, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the City University of Hong Kong, the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, the University Carlos III de Madrid, ENSAE Institut Polytechnique Paris, and École Polytechnique.