Mauro Martino

Mauro Martino is an Italian artist, designer and researcher. He is the founder and director of the Visual Artificial Intelligence Lab at IBM Research, and Professor of Practice at Northeastern University. He graduated from Polytechnic University of Milan, and was a research affiliate with the Senseable City Lab at MIT.

His works have been published in "The Best American Infographics" in 2015 and 2016 editions and have been shown at international festivals and exhibitions including Ars Electronica, RIXC Art Science Festival, Global Exchange at Lincoln Center, TEDx Cambridge THRIVE and TEDx Riga as well as the Serpentine Gallery. His work is in the permanent collection at Ars Electronica Center. In 2017, the project Network Earth received the National Science Foundation's award as Best Scientific Video. The project AI Portraits won the 2019 Webby People's Voice Award in the category NetArt.

Mauro Martino is a pioneer in the use of the artificial neural network in sculpture.

• AI Portraitsis a research project that uses artificial neural network to reconstruct a portrait of a person. The AI system was trained on a dataset that included millions of photos of actors and actresses.
• WonderNetwas developed in collaboration with Albert-László Barabási at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University. WonderNet includes 8 data sculptures which represent 8 different "data-stories" (e.g., art network, flavor network, fake news network, etc.). It was presented at the IEEE VIS 2018 Arts Program in Berlin.
• Forma Fluensuses the world’s largest doodle data set by Google Quick Draw. This project was presented at 123 DATA design exhibition in Paris.
• Charting Culture maps cultural mobility, tracking the births and deaths of notable individuals, from 600 BC to the present day. Charting Culture is one of the most viewed videos of the Nature Video channel on YouTube with over 1.3 million views. This project is part of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit. It was also featured in "The Best American Infographics 2015".
• News Explorer is a web application providing new interface for news analysis and discovery.
• Network Earth won the 2017 Best Scientific Video award of the National Science Foundation. Network Earth explores nature's resilience and interconnections between all life on Earth. It accompanied a research paper published in Nature.
• Rise of Partisanship shows the party polarization of the House of Representatives through time. This project was included in "The Best American Infographics 2016".
• Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interactions explored a new approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions.

• 2019: Webby People's Voice Award – Winner, NetArt, AI Portraits
• 2017: Vizzies Visualization Challenge by National Science Foundation and Popular Science -- Winner, Best Scientific Video, Network Earth
• 2017: Kantar Information is Beautiful Award – Honorable Mention, Unusual, Forma Fluens
• 2016: Innovation by Design Award by Fast Company, Finalist for Websites & Platforms, Watson News Explorer
• 2016: Kantar Information is Beautiful Award – Silver Medal, Commercial Project, IBM Watson News Explorer
• 2015: Kantar Information is Beautiful Award – Gold Medal in Data visualization, Rise of Partisanship
• 2015: Kantar Information is Beautiful Award – Honorable mention - Motion Infographic, Charting Culture