Tomaso Poggio

Tomaso Poggio
Tomaso
Poggio
Co-Director, Research Module Co-Leader
Department:  BCS

Associated Research Module: 

Associated Research Thrust: 

Tomaso A. Poggio, is the Eugene McDermott Professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; co-Director, Center for Brains, Minds and Machines; Member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT; since 2000, member of the faculty of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. 

Born in Genoa, Italy (naturalized in 1994), he received his Doctor in Theoretical Physics from the University of Genoa in 1971 and was a Wissenschaftlicher Assistant, Max Planck Institut für Biologische Kybernetik, Tüebingen, Germany from 1972 until 1981 when he became Associate Professor at MIT. He is an honorary member of the Neuroscience Research Program, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Founding Fellow of AAAI.

He received several awards such as the Otto-Hahn-Medaille Award  of the Max-Planck-Society, the Max Planck Research Award (with M. Fahle), from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the MIT 50K Entrepreneurship Competition Award, the Laurea Honoris Causa from the University of Pavia in 2000 (Volta Bicentennial), the 2003 Gabor Award, the 2009 Okawa prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellowship (2009), the 2017 Rosenfeld Lifetime award, won the first edition of the international Scientific Award "Ratio et Spes" in 2020, the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience in 2014, the ICCV 2021 Helmhltz Prize and the IMPU 2022 Kampe’ de F’eriet Award and Plenary Lecture.

He is one of the most cited computational neuroscientists (with a h-index greater than 100 – based on GoogleScholar). A former Corporate Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation and a former director of PHZ Capital Partners, Inc., is 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).

Graduate Students Mentoring Plan (Poggio Lab)

Email:  tp@ai.mit.edu

Current Advisees

Frederico Azevedo - Research Scientist
Xavier Boix - Research Scientist
Brian Cheung - Postdoctoral Associate
Maria Fernanda De La Torre - Graduate Student
Tomer Galanti - Postdoc
Yena Han - Graduate Student
Gil Kur - Graduate Student
Qianli Liao - Graduate Student
Spandan Madan - Graduate Student
Eva Yi Xie - Undergraduate Student

Past Advisees

Andrzej Banburski - Postdoc
Guy Ben-Yosef - Research Scientist
Ira Ceka - Visiting Researcher
Vanessa D'Amario - Postdoc
Georgios Evangelopoulos - Research Scientist
Noah Golowich - Visiting Student
Gabe Hege - Graduate Student
Erwin Hilton - Graduate Student
Wouter Kool - Postdoctoral Fellow
Owen Lewis - Graduate Student
Boying Meng - Graduate Student
Brando Miranda - Research Assistant
Akshay Rangamani - Research Affilaite
Tomotake Sasaki - Research Affiliate
Andrea Tacchetti - Graduate Student
David Walter - Graduate Student
Zihao Xu - Graduate Student
Chiyuan Zhang - Graduate Student

Projects

CBMM Publications

T. Poggio and Fraser, M., Compositional sparsity of learnable functions, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 61, pp. 438-456, 2024.
T. Poggio and Magrini, M., Cervelli menti algoritmi. Sperling & Kupfer, 2023, p. 272.
H. Mhaskar and Poggio, T., Function approximation by deep networks, Communications on Pure & Applied Analysis, vol. 19, no. 8, pp. 4085 - 4095, 2020.
T. Poggio and Banburski, A., An Overview of Some Issues in the Theory of Deep Networks, IEEJ Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Engineering, vol. 15, no. 11, pp. 1560 - 1571, 2020.
A. Banburski, Gandhi, A., Alford, S., Dandekar, S., Chin, P., and Poggio, T., Dreaming with ARC, Learning Meets Combinatorial Algorithms workshop at NeurIPS 2020. 2020.
E. Malkin, Deza, A., and Poggio, T., CUDA-Optimized real-time rendering of a Foveated Visual System, in Shared Visual Representations in Human and Machine Intelligence (SVRHM) workshop at NeurIPS 2020, 2020.
T. Poggio, Banburski, A., and Liao, Q., Theoretical issues in deep networks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, p. 201907369, 2020.
W. Xiao, Chen, H., Liao, Q., and Poggio, T., Biologically-plausible learning algorithms can scale to large datasets., in International Conference on Learning Representations, (ICLR 2019), 2019.
A. Banburski, Liao, Q., Miranda, B., Rosasco, L., Hidary, J., and Poggio, T., Dynamics & Generalization in Deep Networks -Minimizing the Norm, in NAS Sackler Colloquium on Science of Deep Learning, Washington D.C., 2019.
A. Adler, Araya-Polo, M., and Poggio, T., Deep Recurrent Architectures for Seismic Tomography, in 81st EAGE Conference and Exhibition 2019, 2019.
T. Poggio and Liao, Q., Theory II: Deep learning and optimization, Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences, vol. 66, no. 6, 2018.
T. Poggio and Liao, Q., Theory I: Deep networks and the curse of dimensionality, Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences, vol. 66, no. 6, 2018.
A. Tacchetti, Isik, L., and Poggio, T., Invariant Recognition Shapes Neural Representations of Visual Input, Annual Review of Vision Science, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 403 - 422, 2018.
H. Mhaskar, Liao, Q., and Poggio, T., When and Why Are Deep Networks Better Than Shallow Ones?, AAAI-17: Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2017.
A. Tacchetti, Voinea, S., Evangelopoulos, G., and Poggio, T., Representation Learning from Orbit Sets for One-shot Classification, in AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Science of Intelligence, AAAI, 2017.
Y. Han, Roig, G., Geiger, G., and Poggio, T., Is the Human Visual System Invariant to Translation and Scale?, in AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Science of Intelligence, 2017.
J. Mutch, Anselmi, F., Tacchetti, A., Rosasco, L., Leibo, J. Z., and Poggio, T., Invariant Recognition Predicts Tuning of Neurons in Sensory Cortex, in Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision, Springer, 2017, pp. 85-104.
A. Tacchetti, Isik, L., and Poggio, T., Invariant recognition drives neural representations of action sequences, PLOS Computational Biology, vol. 13, no. 12, p. e1005859, 2017.
O. Lewis and Poggio, T., Object and Scene Perception, in From Neuron to Cognition via Computational Neuroscience, Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press, 2016.
Q. Liao, Leibo, J. Z., and Poggio, T., How Important Is Weight Symmetry in Backpropagation?, in Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), Phoenix, AZ., 2016.
M. Nickel, Rosasco, L., and Poggio, T., Holographic Embeddings of Knowledge Graphs, in Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 2016.
F. Bach and Poggio, T., Introduction Special issue: Deep learning, Information and Inference, vol. 5, pp. 103-104, 2016.
H. Mhaskar and Poggio, T., Deep vs. shallow networks: An approximation theory perspective, Analysis and Applications, vol. 14, no. 06, pp. 829 - 848, 2016.
F. Anselmi, Rosasco, L., and Poggio, T., On invariance and selectivity in representation learning, Information and Inference: A Journal of the IMA, p. iaw009, 2016.
T. Poggio and Anselmi, F., Visual Cortex and Deep Networks: Learning Invariant Representations. Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press, 2016, p. 136.
T. Poggio, Deep Leaning: Mathematics and Neuroscience, A Sponsored Supplement to Science, vol. Brain-Inspired intelligent robotics: The intersection of robotics and neuroscience, pp. 9-12, 2016.
Q. Liao, Leibo, J. Z., and Poggio, T., How Important Is Weight Symmetry in Backpropagation?, in Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), Phoenix, AZ., 2016.
C. Frogner, Zhang, C., Mobahi, H., Araya-Polo, M., and Poggio, T., Learning with a Wasserstein Loss, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2015) 28, 2015.
A. Tacchetti, Isik, L., and Poggio, T., Invariant representations for action recognition in the visual system., Vision Sciences Society, vol. 15, no. 12. Journal of vision, 2015.
S. Voinea, Zhang, C., Evangelopoulos, G., Rosasco, L., and Poggio, T., Word-level Invariant Representations From Acoustic Waveforms, in INTERSPEECH 2014 - 15th Annual Conf. of the International Speech Communication Association, Singapore, 2014.
C. Zhang, Voinea, S., Evangelopoulos, G., Rosasco, L., and Poggio, T., Phone Classification by a Hierarchy of Invariant Representation Layers, in INTERSPEECH 2014 - 15th Annual Conf. of the International Speech Communication Association, Singapore, 2014.
J. Z. Leibo, Liao, Q., and Poggio, T., Subtasks of Unconstrained Face Recognition. 9th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications. (VISAPP)., Lisbon, Portugal, 2014.
T. Poggio and Squire, L. R., Tomaso A. Poggio, in The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography Volume 8, vol. 8, Society for Neuroscience, 2014.
C. Zhang, Evangelopoulos, G., Voinea, S., Rosasco, L., and Poggio, T., A Deep Representation for Invariance and Music Classification, in ICASSP 2014 - 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Florence, Italy, 2014.
S. Villa, Rosasco, L., Poggio, T., Schölkopf, B., Luo, Z., and Vovk, V., On Learnability, Complexity and Stability, in Empirical Inference, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013, pp. 59 - 69.
E. Lattman, Poggio, T., and Westervelt, R., NSF Science and Technology Centers – The Class of 2013. North America Gender Summit, Washington, D.C., 2013.
G. D. Canas, Poggio, T., and Rosasco, L., Learning manifolds with k-means and k-flats, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NIPS 2012), 2012.