PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Giovanni Maria Farinella

Giovanni Maria Farinella is a computer vision researcher at the University of Catania whose work centers on first-person, or egocentric, vision. He co-founded the International Computer Vision Summer School in 2006 with Sebastiano Battiato and Roberto Cipolla, and he received the 2017 PAMI Mark Everingham Prize, which the IEEE awarded to the school. His egocentric video work includes the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset in 2018, Ego4D in 2021 and Ego-Exo4D in 2023. As founder and chief scientific officer of the Catania spinoff Next Vision, he presented its Nairobi indoor-navigation assistant at CES in January 2023. Since September 2025, he is the university's rector's delegate for artificial intelligence in research, alongside his post as a full professor of informatics.

Timeline

  1. 2004–2008

    Computer vision studies at Catania

    Born in 1976, he earns a computer science degree egregia cum laude at the University of Catania in 2004 and becomes a founding member of its IPLAB research group in 2005. He becomes an associate member of the Computer Vision and Robotics Research Group at the University of Cambridge in 2006. In 2008, he receives a PhD in computer vision from Catania and joins the joint laboratory of STMicroelectronics and IPLAB.

  2. 2006–2014

    Founding two summer schools

    In spring 2006, during a research visit to Roberto Cipolla's Computer Vision and Robotics group at Cambridge, he conceives the International Computer Vision Summer School and founds it with Cipolla and Sebastiano Battiato. The school holds its first edition in 2007 with him as director, and in 2014 he founds and directs the Medical Imaging Summer School.

  3. 2017

    The Mark Everingham Prize

    He receives the 2017 PAMI Mark Everingham Prize, which the IEEE awards to ICVSS, the school he directs with Roberto Cipolla and Sebastiano Battiato.

  4. 2018–2023

    EPIC-KITCHENS and Ego4D

    Focused on first-person (egocentric) vision, he coauthors EPIC-KITCHENS in 2018, a 55-hour video benchmark recorded by 32 participants in their own kitchens. In 2021, he coauthors Ego4D, which offers 3,670 hours of daily-life video from 931 camera wearers in 9 countries. Ego-Exo4D follows in 2023 with him among its authors, pairing first- and third-person video of skilled activities such as sports, music and bike repair.

  5. 2022

    Program chair of ECCV 2022

    He serves as a program chair of the European Conference on Computer Vision in 2022 and receives Intel's 2022 Outstanding Researcher Award. He is also a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and a scientific advisor to the NVIDIA AI Technology Centre.

  6. January 2023

    Next Vision at CES

    Next Vision, a University of Catania spinoff that grows out of the research group he leads in the Image Processing Laboratory, builds AI wearable technologies, with him as founder and chief scientific officer. In January 2023, he presents its Nairobi assistant at CES in Las Vegas with co-founders Antonino Furnari and Francesco Ragusa. Nairobi runs on mixed-reality glasses, smartphones or tablets, locating users from camera images and guiding them indoors in augmented reality.

  7. 2024

    On La Repubblica's AI list

    In 2024, the newspaper La Repubblica names him among 500 Italians who count in artificial intelligence, one of four University of Catania professors on the list.

  8. Since September 2025

    Rector's delegate for AI research

    In September 2025, the University of Catania appoints him rector's delegate for artificial intelligence in service of research. He is a full professor of informatics in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and, in December 2025, co-organizes the Sicilian AI Workshop at the university's Città della Scienza.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 53% of people in our data with a known employment countryOur estimates of where AI careers are concentrated now and how countries’ shares of dated positions changed over time.
  3. 46% of living people in our data with known birth and employment countries work outside their birth countryOur estimate of cross-border careers in AI, from country of birth and the country of each current organization.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionOur estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Prof. Giovanni Maria Farinella dmi.unict.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Farinella – ICAR icar.cnr.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. GMF - Professional Activities dmi.unict.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. A Catania l’eccellenza dell’Intelligenza Artificiale, Battiato: “Insegniamo ai computer a vedere” - LiveUnict catania.liveuniversity.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. ICVSS 2026 - International Computer Vision Summer School 2026 icvss.dmi.unict.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. [1804.02748] Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. [2110.07058] Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. [2311.18259] Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  9. Next Vision – Home nextvisionlab.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  10. L’Università di Catania alla Fiera dell'elettronica di Las Vegas livesicilia.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  11. Intelligenza artificiale, docenti Unict tra le eccellenze italiane | UnictMagazine unictmagazine.unict.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  12. Deleghe rettorali | Università di Catania unict.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  13. Giovanni Maria FARINELLA | Department of Mathematics and Computer Science web.dmi.unict.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  14. Sicilian AI Workshop: quando il futuro dell’intelligenza artificiale passa da Catania | UnictMagazine unictmagazine.unict.it. Checked 19 October 2026.