Massimiliano Pontil

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 statistical and algorithmic foundations of machine learning, with contributions to kernel methods, multitask and transfer learning, sparsity-based regularization, learning of dynamical systems, algorithmic fairness, and hyperparameter optimization. He has authored more than 200 papers in leading international journals and conferences, which have received over 18,000 times (h-index 62, Scopus, November 2025). He has received a number of international awards (including the ICML 2013 Best Paper Runner-Up Award and an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship) and has played an active role in the scientific community through service on programme committees (COLT, ICML, NeurIPS), editorial boards (MLJ, JMLR), and advisory roles at leading research institutions. He has held visiting appointments at a number of universities and research institutes, including the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (Cambridge), ENSAE Paris, École Polytechnique, MIT, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.