Tomaso Poggio

Tomaso Poggio is the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He is a member of both the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the McGovern Brain Institute. Poggio previously served as director of the NSF Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM) at MIT, a multi-institutional Science and Technology Center dedicated to studying intelligence.

Poggio's research spans computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. His work focuses on the mathematics of deep learning and the computational neuroscience of the visual cortex. He introduced regularization as a mathematical framework for addressing ill-posed vision problems and made foundational contributions to understanding learning from data. His research has always been interdisciplinary, bridging brains and computers, with applications ranging from biophysical studies of the visual system to computational analyses of vision and learning in humans and machines.

His recent publications reveal a strong focus on theoretical deep learning, particularly compositional sparsity, regularization methods, and the mathematical foundations of neural networks. Poggio's work demonstrates how deep networks overcome the curse of dimensionality through compositionally sparse structures present in most practically relevant functions.

• Laurea Honoris Causa from the University of Pavia for the Volta Bicentennial
• 2003 Gabor Award
• Okawa Prize 2009
• 2014 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience
• 2017 Rosenfeld Lifetime award
• International Scientific Award 'Ratio et Spes'
• 2022 Kampe de Fériet award
• 2021 Helmholtz Prize for 'HMDB: A large video database for human motion recognition'

Poggio has mentored several leaders in AI and neuroscience, including Christof Koch (President of Allen Institute), Amnon Shashua (CTO and founder of Mobileye), and Demis Hassabis (CEO and founder of DeepMind). His research group at MIT has received significant funding from NSF through the CBMM center, enabling interdisciplinary work that combines neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

At the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, Poggio leads research on visual recognition, metric learning, and spatio-temporal convolutional networks. His team investigates how visual cortex represents actions and how to create robust representations that handle transformations like pose, scale, and rotation without affecting semantic categories.