Marco Cuturi

Marco Cuturi is a Professor of Statistics at ENSAE (École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique), part of Institut Polytechnique de Paris, where he has been affiliated since 2016, working part-time since 2018. He is also a CREST Permanent Member and a Research Scientist at Apple ML Research in Paris, having previously worked at Google Brain from 2018 to 2022. His academic journey includes positions as an Associate Professor at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Informatics (2010-2016), a lecturer at Princeton University's ORFE department (2009-2010), and postdoctoral research at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo (2005-2007).

Dr. Cuturi earned his Ph.D. from École des Mines de Paris in 2005 and holds a master's degree from ENS Cachan, having graduated from ENSAE in 2001. His research centers on the application of optimal transport theory to machine learning and statistics, with significant contributions to computational optimal transport, kernel methods, and time series analysis. His influential work includes the development of the Sinkhorn distance for fast computation of optimal transport, soft-DTW for time series alignment, and various applications of optimal transport in machine learning.

His research program explores how geometric structures can be leveraged in statistical learning, with recent work focusing on entropic optimal transport solvers, Gromov-Wasserstein distances, and applications to single-cell biology and multimodal learning. Dr. Cuturi's publications reveal a consistent trajectory of developing theoretically grounded yet computationally efficient methods that bridge optimal transport theory with practical machine learning applications across diverse domains including computer vision, natural language processing, and computational biology.

Among his professional recognitions is a Notable Paper Award at AISTATS 2020 for his work on regularization in optimal transport. He serves as an Associate Editor for JMLR and has held senior area chair positions at NeurIPS and ICML. Dr. Cuturi has organized major machine learning events including the Machine Learning Summer School in Kyoto (2012, 2015) and co-organized workshops on optimal transport at major conferences.

Dr. Cuturi has supervised numerous doctoral students including Nina Vesseron, Théo Uscidda, Charlotte Bunne, and Othmane Sebbouh, with research spanning optimal transport applications in generative modeling, representation learning, and biological data analysis. His current research group at ENSAE and Apple continues to push the boundaries of optimal transport methodology and its applications to cutting-edge machine learning problems.