On the occasion of Italian Research Day in the World, established in memory of the anniversary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci on April 15, 1452, meet Italian scientists and scholars from the local research community – Pietro Perona, Martin Monti, Matteo Pellegrini, and Massimo Ciavolella – to learn about their work and how it can enable a sustainable future and benefit society. Dr. Marzia Polito will moderate a discussion spanning from Computer Science to Psychology, Biology and Medical Humanities.
Third event of “Building a sustainable future,” a series of three outreach presentations featuring prominent Italians from Los Angeles area universities and tech industry, this program is presented by the Consulate General of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles in parntership with ISSNAF – Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation. The event also celebrates the launch of the LA Chapter of ISSNAF.
Date and time: April 13 2023 | 6:00 pm
Venue: Italian Cultural Institute
1023 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles
Dr. Pietro Perona is the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on vision: how do we see and how can we build machines that see. Professor Perona is interested in visual recognition, more specifically visual categorization. In collaboration with his students, he develops algorithms to enable machines to learn to recognize frogs, cars, faces and trees with minimal human supervision, and to enable machines to learn from human experts. Professor Perona is committed to developing responsible artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
Dr. Martin Monti is a professor in the departments of Psychology and Neurosurgery at UCLA. Professor Monti’s research focuses on the neural mechanisms that accompany the loss and recovery of consciousness, with particular attention to disorders such as Coma, the Vegetative State, and the Minimally Conscious State.
Dr. Matteo Pellegrini is a biophysicist who has served on the UCLA Life Sciences Division faculty since he joined the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology in 2005. Dr. Pellegrini earned his B.A. in Physics at Columbia University and his Ph.D. in Physics at Stanford. He was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, where he worked on computational biology. Following his postdoctoral studies, Dr. Pellegrini co-founded a start-up company and later worked for the pharmaceutical company, Merck, before returning to UCLA. His laboratory research centers on the development of novel computational approaches to analyze large-scale genomic data.
Dr. Massimo Ciavolella is the Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at the European Languages and Transcultural Studies and Comparative Literature departments of UCLA. His studies focus on Medical Humanities and Renaissance Italian theater. He studied at the University of Bologna and Rome, and received a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Dr. Marzia Polito is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and a Manager at Google, working on Google Lens to help users search what they see. She holds a Bachelor in Mathematics from the Università degli Studi di Firenze, a PhD in Mathematics from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and was a PostDoc at California Institute of Technology, where she transitioned from Algebraic Geometry to Computer Vision and Machine Learning.