Mauro Martino

Mauro Martino is a scientist and artist who directs the Visual AI Lab he founded at IBM Research and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and he is a Professor of Practice at Northeastern University. After research at MIT's SENSEable City Lab and network science with Albert-László Barabási at Northeastern, he coauthored a 2014 Science paper that traced two millennia of intellectual mobility through the birth and death places of more than 150,000 notable people. His AI work brought generative adversarial networks into art: Vox2Net, shown at a NeurIPS workshop in 2018, turned sculptures into 3D networks, and AI Portraits, winner of a 2019 Webby People's Voice Award, reached over 8 million unique users per day. In 2021, Strolling Cities brought voice-driven generative images of Italian cities to the Venice Biennale, and his bronze sculptures Atomic Reverberations were permanently installed on the MIT campus in 2025.

Now at: Northeastern University and IBM Research
Badges: Founder
Bridge

Timeline

2010

Research at MIT's SENSEable City Lab

He works as a research affiliate at MIT's SENSEable City Lab with Carlo Ratti while earning a PhD in design and technologies at Politecnico di Milano, with a related project on urban interaction design. In December 2010, he coauthors "Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions" in PLoS ONE with Ratti, Steven Strogatz and others, drawing regional boundaries from networks of billions of individual human transactions.
2014–2015

Network science at Northeastern

He works with Albert-László Barabási as an assistant research professor at Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research and with David Lazer at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. In August 2014, he coauthors "A network framework of cultural history" in Science, which traces two millennia of intellectual mobility through the birth and death places of more than 150,000 notable people. His "Rise of Partisanship in the U.S. House of Representatives", made with Clio Andris, wins gold for data visualization at the 2015 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards.
2016–2017

Watson Cognitive Visualization Lab

At IBM, he is manager and designer of the IBM Watson News Explorer, which uses natural language processing to build networks of the people, places and organizations in the news and wins silver at the 2016 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards. While managing IBM's Watson Cognitive Visualization Lab, he creates Network Earth with Jianxi Gao, Baruch Barzel and Albert-László Barabási for a Nature paper on Earth's resilience, and the video is named the 2017 Experts' Choice for video in the NSF and Popular Science Vizzies Challenge. His 2017 project Forma Fluens analyzes 2.5 billion drawings and enters the permanent collection of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz.
2018–2019

AI Portraits and GAN sculptures

In December 2018, he presents Vox2Net with Nima Dehmamy and Luca Stornaiuolo at a NeurIPS workshop; its modified pix2pix GAN turns a point cloud of a sculpture into a network of spherical nodes and tubular links. With Stornaiuolo, he builds AI Portraits, a GAN trained on millions of photos of actors and actresses that generates portraits of the people in front of the camera and reaches over 8 million unique users per day. The project wins the 2019 Webby People's Voice Award in the NetArt category.
2019–2020

150 Years of Nature

With BarabásiLab, he creates 150 Years of Nature in 2019, a data visualization project commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the journal Nature. In 2020, it wins a Webby Award, a Webby People's Voice Award and Fast Company's Innovation by Design award for best data design.
2021

Strolling Cities in Venice

In 2021, he shows Strolling Cities, made with Ingrid Paoletti of Politecnico di Milano, in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Fed with poems and human voices, its generative AI invents images of Italian cities, and the team builds a Voice-to-City technology for speaking with the model.
2025

Atomic Reverberations at MIT

In 2025, Atomic Reverberations, his bronze sculptures that turn AI into tangible art, are permanently installed on the MIT campus in Cambridge. In May 2025, he coauthors "Small Models, Smarter Learning: The Power of Joint Task Training", which shows that pairing easy and hard tasks lets models learn with 2 to 7 times fewer parameters.
As of October 2026

Visual AI Lab at IBM Research

He directs the Visual AI Lab that he founded at IBM Research and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, where he is a principal research staff member and manager with IBM. He is also a Professor of Practice at Northeastern University in Boston.