Paolo Rota

Paolo Rota is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Trento, affiliated with the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) and the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC). His research lies at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and multimodal AI, with a strong emphasis on vision-language models and activity recognition.

His research interests include zero-shot action recognition, temporal action localization, open-world recognition, and person image synthesis. He explores how large multimodal models can be leveraged for practical applications in video analytics and industrial AI, often developing training-free or source-free adaptation methods that improve model generalization.

Recent publications show a consistent trend in utilizing large vision-language models (e.g., CLIP, LMMs) for tasks such as image classification, domain adaptation, and action recognition, emphasizing simplicity, zero-shot capabilities, and real-world applicability. His work frequently appears in top venues including CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, and ICIAP.

He actively mentors PhD students including Benedetta Liberatori, Jiaqi Liu, Yan Shu, Shiyao Xu, and Alessandro Conti, often co-advising with faculty such as Elisa Ricci and Nicu Sebe. He also contributes to teaching, including delivering lectures on machine learning for the MSc in Data Science program.

He co-founded Mountain Maps, a startup using AI to enhance outdoor navigation and mountain exploration. His work bridges academic research and practical innovation, aiming to increase the real-world impact of AI systems.