Mauro Martino is an Italian artist, designer and researcher.[1] He is the founder and director of the Visual Artificial Intelligence Lab at IBM Research, and Professor of Practice at Northeastern University.[2] He graduated from Polytechnic University of Milan, and was a research affiliate with the Senseable City Lab at MIT. Mauro was formerly an Assistant Research Professor at Northeastern University working with Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at Center for Complex Network Research and with David Lazer and Fellows at The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University.[3]
His works have been published in "The Best American Infographics" in the 2015[4] and 2016 editions[5] and have been shown at international festivals and exhibitions including Ars Electronica,[6] RIXC Art Science Festival,[7] Global Exchange at Lincoln Center,[8] TEDx Cambridge THRIVE, TEDx Riga,[9] and the Serpentine Gallery.[10] His work is in the permanent collection at Ars Electronica Center.[11] In 2017, Martino and his team received the National Science Foundation's award for Best Scientific Video for the project Network Earth.[12] In 2019, Martino and Luca Stornaiuolo won the 2019 Webby People's Voice Award in the category NetArt for the project AI Portraits.[13]
The project 150 Years of Nature won multiple awards such as Fast Company - Innovation by Design Awards Best Data Design 2020,[14] Webby Award 2020, Webby People's Voice Award 2020.[15] This project, along with other works created in collaboration with Barabási Lab (e.g., Wonder Net, A Century of Physics, Data Sculpture in Bronze, Control, Resilience, Success in Science, Fake News), was shown at the "Barabási Lab. Hidden Patterns" exhibitions at ZKM Center for Art and Media[16] and Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest.[17]
Mauro Martino is a pioneer in the use of the artificial neural network in sculpture.[18][19]