Bio:

Tomaso A. Poggio, is the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Dept. of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT and was the director of the NSF Center for Brains, Minds and Machines at MIT of which MIT and Harvard are the main member Institutions.

He is a member of both the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and of the McGovern Brain Institute. He is an honorary member of the Neuroscience Research Program, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Founding Fellow of AAAI and a founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Among other honors he received the Laurea Honoris Causa from the University of Pavia for the Volta Bicentennial, the 2003 Gabor Award, the Okawa Prize 2009, the AAAS Fellowship, the 2014 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, the 2017 Rosenfeld Lifetime award, won the first edition of the international Scientific Award "Ratio et Spes", the 2022 Kampe de Fériet award. Tomaso Poggio and team were awarded the 2021 Helmholtz Prize for their paper HMDB: A large video database for human motion recognition

He is one of the most cited computational scientists with contributions ranging from the biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system to the computational analyses of vision and learning in humans and machines.

With W. Reichardt he characterized quantitatively the visuo-motor control system in the fly. With D. Marr, he introduced the seminal idea of levels of analysis in computational neuroscience. He introduced regularization as a mathematical framework to approach the ill-posed problems of vision and the key problem of learning from data. The citation for the 2009 Okawa prize mentions his “...outstanding contributions to the establishment of computational neuroscience, and pioneering researches ranging from the biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system to the computational analysis of vision and learning in humans and machines.”

His research has always been interdisciplinary, between brains and computers. It is now focused on the mathematics of deep learning and on the computational neuroscience of the visual cortex.

A former Corporate Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation and a former director of PHZ Capital Partners, Inc., was a director of Mobileye and was involved in starting, or investing in, several other high tech companies including Arris Pharmaceutical, nFX, Imagen, Digital Persona and Deep Mind. Among his PhD students and post-docs are some of the today’s leaders in the Science and in the Engineering of Intelligence, from Christof Koch (President and Chief Scientific Officer, Allen Institute) to Amnon Shashua (CTO and founder, Mobileye) and Demis Hassabis (CEO and founder, Deep Mind).

Videos of interest:

• Stats 385 - Theories of Deep Learning - Tomaso Poggio - Lecture 5
• Quest | CBMM history and future
• A theory of deep learning: explaining the approximation, optimization and generalization puzzles: Part 1
• A theory of deep learning: explaining the approximation, optimization and generalization puzzles: Part 2