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Massimiliano Pontil

Senior Researcher Tenured - Principal Investigator
Senior Researcher Tenured - Principal Investigator
Computational Statistics and Machine Learning
Massimiliano Pontil
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About

Massimiliano Pontil is a Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), where he leads the Computational Statistics and Machine Learning Unit and serves as co-director of the ELLIS Unit Genoa, a joint initiative of IIT and the University of Genoa. He is also a Professor at University College London, and a member of the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence. His work focuses on the mathematical foundations of machine learning, with contributions to areas including kernel methods, multitask and transfer learning, operator learning and dynamical systems, sparsity regularization, and statistical learning theory. He has published more than 200 papers in leading international journals and conference proceedings. He has played an active role in the scientific community through programme committee service (COLT, ICML, NeurIPS), editorial board membership (MLJ, JMLR), and advisory roles at leading research institutions. He has held visiting appointments at a number of universities and research institutes, including ENSAE Paris, École Polytechnique, the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, MIT, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Beyond research, he enjoys farming and making wine and olive oil. 


Education

Title: Ph.D. in Physics
Institute: University of Genoa
Location: Genoa
Country: Italy
From: 1996 To: 1999

All Publications
2026
Bojovic M., Salzo S., Pontil M.
AdaGrad and Universality in Composite Optimization: Failure and a Remedy
OPT 2026: Optimization for Machine Learning (NeurIPS 2026 Workshop)
Conference Review Conference
2026
Pansardi O., Cavallo A., Turri G., Panzeri S., Sanfey A.G., Becchio C.
Altruistic punishment in action: movement vigour in neuroeconomic choice
Royal Society Open Science, vol. 13, (no. 4)
2026
Turri G., Kostic V., Novelli P., Pontil M.
A Randomized Algorithm to Solve Reduced Rank Operator Regression
SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science, vol. 8, (no. 1), pp. 23-45
2026
Germain T., Flamary R., Kostic V., Lounici K.
A Spectral-Grassmann Wasserstein metric for operator representations of dynamical systems
International Conference on Learning Representations, pp. 119652-119688
Conference Paper Conference
2026
Ramos T., Fröhlich A., Perazzo D., Pontil M.
Drift-aware uncertainty quantification via a functional spectral-Newton method
Catch, Adapt, and Operate: Monitoring ML Models Under Drift Workshop, ICLR.
Conference Paper Conference
Awards and Achievements
2024
Sabattini L., Coriolano A., Casert C., Forti S., Barnard S. B., Beltram F., Pontil M., Whitelam S., Coletti C., Rossi A.
AI-Driven Protocol for 2D Materials Growth: Integrating Adaptive Synthesis and Spectral Analysis
2024
Sabattini L., Coriolano A., Casert C., Forti S., Barnard S. B., Beltram F., Pontil M., Whitelam S., Coletti C., Rossi A.
BEST ORAL PRESENTATION: AI-Driven Protocol for 2D Materials Growth: Integrating Adaptive Synthesis and Spectral Analysis
2023
Bonati L., Perego S., Buigues P., Novelli P., Grazzi R., Pontil M.
Open Catalyst Challenge - Runner Up Team
2022
Pontil M.
Spoke 10 Leader, FAIR Foundation
2020
Pontil M.
Advisory Board, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany
Editorships
2013-2025
Pontil M.
Journal of Machine Learning Research
2009-2018
Pontil M.
Machine Learning Journal