Mauro Martino presenting Forma Fluens at Ars Electronica Center

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 Northeastern University (NU) is a private research university with its main campus in Boston. Established in 1898, the university offers undergraduate and graduate programs on its main campus as well as satellite campuses in Charlotte, North C ...

. He graduated from

Polytechnic University of Milan The Polytechnic University of Milan () is the largest technical university in Italy, with about 42,000 students. The university offers undergraduate, graduate and higher education courses in engineering, architecture and design. Founded in 186 ...

, and was a research affiliate with the

Senseable City Lab The MIT Senseable City Laboratory is a digital laboratory within MIT's City Design and Development group, within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, which works in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. The lab aims to investigate and anti ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. 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 Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. His works have been published in "The Best American Infographics" in the 2015 and 2016 editions and have been shown at international festivals and exhibitions including

Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in th ...

RIXC The Centre for new media culture in Riga (RIXC) is the joint effort of a number of independent local Latvian cultural groups working in the fields of new media, art, film, music, youth culture and the social projects. The founders of RIXC are ...

Art Science Festival, Global Exchange at

Lincoln Center Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (also simply known as Lincoln Center) is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to 5 millio ...

, TEDx Cambridge THRIVE, TEDx Riga, and the

Serpentine Gallery The Serpentine Galleries are two contemporary art galleries in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Central London. Recently rebranded to just Serpentine, the organisation is split across Serpentine South, previously known as the Serpentine Gallery ...

. His work is in the permanent collection at

Ars Electronica Center Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in th ...

. In 2017, Martino and his team received the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

's award for Best Scientific Video for the project ''Network Earth''. In 2019, Martino and Luca Stornaiuolo won the 2019 Webby People's Voice Award in the category NetArt for the project ''AI Portraits.'' The project ''150 Years of Nature'' won multiple awards such as

Fast Company ''Fast Company'' is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes six print issues per year. History ''Fast Company'' was launched in November 1995 by Alan We ...

- Innovation by Design Awards Best Data Design 2020,

Webby Award The Webby Awards are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over two thousand industry experts and technology innovators. Categories includ ...

2020, Webby People's Voice Award 2020. 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 and Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Mauro Martino is a pioneer in the use of the

artificial neural network Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected units ...

in sculpture.

Notable works

*''Strolling Cities'' is an interactive AI art project created in collaboration with

Politecnico di Milano The Polytechnic University of Milan () is the largest technical university in Italy, with about 42,000 students. The university offers undergraduate, graduate and higher education courses in engineering, architecture and design. Founded in 186 ...

and exhibited in the Italian Pavilion at the 2021

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

. ''Strolling Cities'' is the first project that "unites generative AI, human voice, poetry and urban landscape." The neural network model was trained on "millions of photos taken during the recent lockdowns (’20/’21) that show the urban space as an unfiltered landscape of walls, streets, and buildings." One of the main characteristics of this project is that Italian cities appear empty, without their population. The project makes it possible to "manipulate the urban landscape with the voice, using any kind of vocal input, from simple utterances to more complex phrases." The video installations used in the exhibit featured 9 Italian cities:

Bergamo Bergamo (; lmo, Bèrghem ; from the proto- Germanic elements *''berg +*heim'', the "mountain home") is a city in the alpine Lombardy region of northern Italy, approximately northeast of Milan, and about from Switzerland, the alpine lakes C ...

Bologna Bologna (, , ; egl, label=Emilian language, Emilian, Bulåggna ; lat, Bononia) is the capital and largest city of the Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy. It is the seventh most populous city in Italy with about 400,000 inhabitants and 1 ...

, Catania,

Como Como (, ; lmo, Còmm, label=Comasco , or ; lat, Novum Comum; rm, Com; french: Côme) is a city and ''comune'' in Lombardy, Italy. It is the administrative capital of the Province of Como. Its proximity to Lake Como and to the Alps has m ...

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico ...

Genoa Genoa ( ; it, Genova ; lij, Zêna ). is the capital of the Regions of Italy, Italian region of Liguria and the List of cities in Italy, sixth-largest city in Italy. In 2015, 594,733 people lived within the city's administrative limits. As of t ...

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard language, Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the List of cities in Italy, second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 ...

Palermo Palermo ( , ; scn, Palermu , locally also or ) is a city in southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Metropolitan City of Palermo, the city's surrounding metropolitan province. The city is noted for it ...

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus ( legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

and

Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The isla ...

. The authors whose poems appeared in the installation included

Alda Merini Alda Merini (21 March 1931, in Milan – 1 November 2009, in Milan) was an Italian writer and poet. Her work earned the attention and the admiration of other Italian writers, such as Giorgio Manganelli, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Pier Paolo Paso ...

Giulia Niccolai Giulia Niccolai (21 December 1934 – 22 June 2021) was an Italian photographer, poet, novelist, and translator. Biography The daughter of an Italian father and an American mother, she was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in both Italy and the ...

Stefano Benni Stefano Benni (born 12 August 1947) is an Italian satirical writer, poet and journalist. His books have been translated into around 20 foreign languages and scored notable commercial success. 2.5 million copies of his books have been sold in Ita ...

Giorgio Caproni Giorgio Caproni ( Livorno, 7 January 1912 – 22 January 1990, Rome) was an Italian poet, literary critic and translator, especially from French. His work was also part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1948 Summer Olympics. ...

Cesare Pavese Cesare Pavese ( , ; 9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer, translator, literary critic, and essayist. He is often referred to as one of the most influential Italian writers of his time. Early li ...

Goffredo Parise Goffredo Parise (8 December 1929 in Vicenza – 31 August 1986 in Treviso) was an Italian writer, journalist, and screenwriter. He won the Viareggio Prize in 1965 for his novel ''Il padrone'' ''(The Boss)'' and the Strega Prize in 1982 for ...

, and

Valerio Magrelli Valerio Magrelli (born 1957, Rome) is an Italian poet. He graduated in philosophy at the University of Rome and is an expert in French literature which he has taught and teaches at University of Pisa and University of Cassino. He debuted as ...

. *''150 Years of Nature'' is a data visualization project created in collaboration with Barabási Lab and dedicated to the 150th Anniversary of

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans ar ...

. It includes an interactive tool, "data movie" and the cover showing the co-citation network of

publications throughout its history. ''150 Years of Nature'' was the Webby Award Winner in 2020; it was awarded the Best Data Design at Fast Company - Innovation by Design Awards. The project is exhibited as part of the "Barabási Lab. Hidden Patterns" exhibitions at ZKM Center for Art and Media and Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. *''AI Portraits'' is a research project that uses

to reconstruct a portrait of a person. The AI system was trained on a dataset that included millions of photos of actors and actresses. * ''Wonder Net'' was developed in collaboration with

Albert-László Barabási Albert-László Barabási (born March 30, 1967) is a Romanian-born Hungarian-American physicist, best known for his discoveries in network science and network medicine. He is Distinguished University Professor and Robert Gray Professor of Netwo ...

at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University. Wonder Net 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 Fluens'' uses the world’s largest doodle data set by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

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

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

. * ''Rise of Partisanship'' shows the party

polarization Polarization or polarisation may refer to: Mathematics *Polarization of an Abelian variety, in the mathematics of complex manifolds *Polarization of an algebraic form, a technique for expressing a homogeneous polynomial in a simpler fashion by ...

of the

House of Representatives House of Representatives is the name of legislative bodies in many countries and sub-national entitles. In many countries, the House of Representatives is the lower house of a bicameral legislature, with the corresponding upper house often c ...

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.

Awards

* 2020: Fast Company - Innovation by Design Awards, Best Data Design: 150 Years of Nature *2020: Webby Award Winner: 150 Years of Nature, Webby People's Voice Award Winner: 150 Years of Nature *2019: Webby People's Voice Award – Winner, NetArt, AI Portraits *2017: Vizzies Visualization Challenge by

and

Popular Science ''Popular Science'' (also known as ''PopSci'') is an American digital magazine carrying popular science content, which refers to articles for the general reader on science and technology subjects. ''Popular Science'' has won over 58 awards, incl ...

—Winner, Best Scientific Video, Network Earth * 2017: Kantar Information is Beautiful Award – Honorable Mention, Unusual, Forma Fluens * 2016: Innovation by Design Award by

, 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

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Martino, Mauro Artificial intelligence art Data scientists Italian digital artists Italian designers Year of birth missing (living people) Living people