First event of “Building a sustainable future,” a series of three outreach talks featuring prominent Italians from LA area universities and the tech industry.
Dr. Marzia Polito (Google) and Prof. Giovanni Cacciamani (Keck School of Medicine of USC) will illustrate applications in the evolving fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, ranging from enhancing surgery to visual understanding, building a better user experience and more. Journalist Valentina Martelli will moderate the panel.
Date: September 28, 2022
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: Italian Cultural Institute
1023 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles
Dr. MARZIA POLITO (she/her) 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. In her long tenure at Google she also worked on text understanding for Advertising, and query understanding for Assistant. She was a Senior Research Manager at Amazon Web Services, a startup co-founder, and a Research Scientist at Intel Corporation
She has been a member of ISSNAF since its inception.
Her varied interests and experience cover multiple aspects of text and visual understanding, from algorithms to infrastructure and platform building, all the way to engineering a great user experience. She strives to build respectful, inclusive and fair products.
Creating an inclusive and diverse community in technology has always been top of mind for her. She is very active in diversity recruiting, mentoring and leadership growth.
Dr. GIOVANNI E. CACCIAMANI is an Italian urological surgeon and physician-scientist. He is an Associate Professor of Urology and Radiology at the Department of Urology of the University of Southern California and Co-Director of the Artificial Intelligence Center for Surgical and Clinical Application in Urology and Vice-chair of the Research Council at the Department of Urology of USC.
Cacciamani earned his Medical Degree (M.D.) and Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Medicine and Surgery in 2013 from the University of Verona. He completed a Urology residency in 2018 at “Confortini” Hospital, the University of Verona. In 2018 he completed a Minimally Invasive Surgery Research fellowship at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Cacciamani’s primary areas of interest are Urological Oncological diseases (Prostate Cancer, Renal Cancer, and Bladder Cancer), Patients safety, and Artificial Intelligence applications in healthcare, with a particular interest in the use of machine learning for the identification of radiomics features to predict the pathology from the imaging and in the detection of predictors of recurrence of urological malignancies.
Dr. Cacciamani has published 230 publications in international peer-review journals of reference in the Urologic-oncological scientific field, 8 Prospero Protocols (University of York), 15 book chapters, and the author of more than 150 abstracts in national and international meetings.
In 2021 Dr. Cacciamani received the “Matula Award 2021” for the best Italian urologist under 40 and was awarded the “Citizen of the Year 2021” in Verona for the category “healthcare.”
Dr. Cacciamani is a member of eleven professional societies in the urological field. He is the Chairman of the Young Academic Urology (YAU) Working party of the European Association of Urology in Uro-Technology (2021-present) and a Board member of the European Association of Urology Research Foundation. In July 2020, he obtained the10-years National Scientific Qualification for Associate Professorship (clinical and research) in Urology by the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
VALENTINA MARTELLI is an Italian-American television journalist, screenwriter, director and producer. She is also the founder and Creative Director of ITTV Forum&Festival. In Italy, she has worked as investigative reporter and anchorwoman for RAI Italian National Television. She went from reporting on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, as war correspondent, to hosting the Daily News for Children and the noon news edition. She moved to the U.S. in 2005 and has been since the Correspondent on camera based in Los Angeles, for RAI. In the U.S. she also founded IbiscusMedia, Inc., an Entertainment and Media Company, that focuses on international documentaries, film and television series.
In 2019 she started Good Girls Planet the company behind ITTV FORUM&FESTIVAL and the Showrunner Lab.
She is Board member of the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce West and Advisor for Ecoflix, the first not-for-profit media group dedicated to saving animals and the planet.
She currently splits her time between California and Italy.