Massimiliano Pontil

Massimiliano Pontil is a **part-time Professor of Computational Statistics and Machine Learning** in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and a Senior Researcher at the **Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)**, leading the **Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML)** research group. He holds an MSc and PhD in Physics from the University of Genova (1994 and 1999) and has held postdoctoral positions at MIT and research roles at institutions like the University of Siena and City University of Hong Kong before joining UCL in 2003.

**Research Interests**: Focuses on machine learning, including statistical learning theory, kernel methods, multitask and transfer learning, online learning, sparsity regularization, and applications in computer vision, bioinformatics, and user modeling. His work bridges theoretical foundations (e.g., regularization, optimization) with practical applications.

**Publications**: Over 100 papers in top venues like NIPS/NeurIPS, ICML, COLT, and JMLR, covering topics such as structured sparsity, multitask learning, and optimization frameworks. Recent work emphasizes meta-learning, fair algorithms, and dynamical systems learning.

**Grants & Awards**: EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship. His research has been applied to diverse domains, including bioinformatics (e.g., protein-protein interface prediction) and social network analysis (e.g., mobility patterns).

**Labs/Teams**: Leads the CSML group at IIT, collaborating on projects like Koopman operator regression and conditional meta-learning. Active in organizing workshops on multi-task learning and structured outputs (e.g., PASCAL thematic programs).