Tomaso Poggio

Tomaso Armando Poggio (born 11 September 1947 in Genoa, Italy), is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a multi-institutional collaboration headquartered at the McGovern Institute since 2013.

His interdisciplinary research on the problem of intelligence, between brains and computers, started at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany in collaborations with Werner E. Reichardt, David C. Marr and Francis H.C. Crick, among others.

His recent work is focused on computational neuroscience in close collaboration with several physiology labs, trying to answer the questions of how our visual system learns to see and recognize scenes and objects.

[3] 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.

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 (CEO and founder, Mobileye) and Demis Hassabis (CEO and founder, Deep Mind, and Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2024).