Michael Bronstein

Michael Bronstein is a Professor at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI Lugano) in Switzerland and Imperial College London in the UK, where he holds the Chair in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition. He serves as Head of Graph Learning Research at Twitter following the acquisition of his startup Fabula AI, and maintains a principal engineer position at Intel Perceptual Computing. His research focuses on the interplay between geometry, machine learning, and computer vision, with particular emphasis on non-Euclidean structured data.

Professor Bronstein received his Ph.D. with distinction in Computer Science from the Technion in 2007. He has held visiting appointments at Stanford University, MIT, Harvard University (as a Radcliffe Fellow), and Tel Aviv University, and has been affiliated with multiple Institutes for Advanced Study including TUM-IAS where he was a Rudolf Diesel Industry Fellow (2017). He is a Fellow of IAPR, Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of the Young Academy of Europe.

His research program centers on theoretical and computational methods in spectral and metric geometry applied to computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning. He pioneered the field of geometric deep learning, developing novel neural network architectures that process non-Euclidean data structures like graphs and manifolds. His work spans from theoretical foundations to practical applications, with over 100 publications in top scientific journals and conferences, and has been featured in international media including CNN.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong trajectory in geometric deep learning with applications spanning computer vision, 3D shape analysis, social network analysis, and bioinformatics. His research consistently bridges theoretical innovation with real-world applications, developing novel neural architectures for processing complex data structures. The work demonstrates increasing interdisciplinary reach, connecting machine learning with fields from particle physics to molecular biology.

• Dalle Molle Prize (2018)
• Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2018)
• ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2018)
• Amazon AWS Machine Learning Research Award (2018)
• Fellow, International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)
• Google Faculty Research Award (2017)
• Radcliffe fellowship, Harvard University (2017)
• Rudolf Diesel industrial fellowship, TU Munich (2017)
• ERC Consolidator Grant (2016)
• World Economic Forum Young Scientist (2014)

Professor Bronstein has secured multiple ERC grants (Starting Grant 2012, Proof of Concept Grants 2016 and 2018, Consolidator Grant 2016) and has mentored numerous students who have contributed to over 30 granted patents. He has chaired more than a dozen conferences and workshops in his field and served as area chair at major computer vision conferences including ECCV 2016 and ICCV 2017. His research group at USI Lugano collaborates extensively with industry partners including Intel and Twitter.

As a serial entrepreneur, Professor Bronstein co-founded Novafora (2005-2009) developing large-scale video analysis, Invision (2009-2012) which created low-cost 3D sensors and was acquired by Intel, and Fabula AI (2018-2019) focused on fake news detection which was acquired by Twitter. His work bridges theoretical research with commercial applications, with his technology contributing to Intel RealSense and Twitter's graph learning infrastructure.