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 a Professor of Practice at Northeastern University.^[2]

Martino graduated from the Polytechnic University of Milan and was a research affiliate with the Senseable City Lab at MIT. He formerly served as an Assistant Research Professor at Northeastern University, working alongside Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at the Center for Complex Network Research and with David Lazer and Fellows at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University.^[3,28]

A pioneer in the use of artificial neural networks in sculpture, Martino's works have been published in the 2015 and 2016 editions of "The Best American Infographics".^{[10,4,6,7,8,9,18]} His art has been exhibited at international festivals and venues including Ars Electronica, the RIXC Art Science Festival, Global Exchange at Lincoln Center, TEDx Cambridge THRIVE, TEDx Riga, and the Serpentine Gallery, with his work also held in the permanent collection at the Ars Electronica Center.^{[10,4,6,7,8,9,11]} Furthermore, projects created in collaboration with the Barabási Lab—such as Wonder Net, A Century of Physics, Data Sculpture in Bronze, Control, Resilience, Success in Science, and Fake News—along with 150 Years of Nature, were presented at the "Barabási Lab. Hidden Patterns" exhibitions at the ZKM Center for Art and Media and the Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest.^[17,16]

Martino and his team received the National Science Foundation's award for Best Scientific Video in 2017 for the project Network Earth.^[12] In 2019, Martino and Luca Stornaiuolo won the Webby People's Voice Award in the NetArt category for AI Portraits.^[13] Additionally, the project 150 Years of Nature earned several honors, including the Fast Company - Innovation by Design Awards Best Data Design 2020, the Webby Award 2020, and the Webby People's Voice Award 2020.^[15,14,42]

Strolling Cities is an interactive AI art project created in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano and exhibited in the Italian Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale. It is the first project that "unites generative AI, human voice, poetry and urban landscape." Its 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," with a main characteristic being that Italian cities appear empty, without their population. The project allows users 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, Bologna, Catania, Como, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Palermo, Rome and Venice, and included poems by authors such as Alda Merini, Giulia Niccolai, Stefano Benni, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, Goffredo Parise, and Valerio Magrelli. AI Portraits is another research project that uses an artificial neural network to reconstruct a portrait of a person, trained on a dataset containing millions of photos of actors and actresses.

150 Years of Nature is a data visualization project created in collaboration with Barabási Lab and dedicated to the 150th Anniversary of Nature, including an interactive tool, a "data movie", and a cover illustrating the co-citation network of Nature publications throughout its history. It was the Webby Award Winner in 2020, received the Best Data Design award at the Fast Company - Innovation by Design Awards, and is exhibited as part of the "Barabási Lab. Hidden Patterns" exhibitions at the ZKM Center for Art and Media and Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Charting Culture maps cultural mobility by tracking the births and deaths of notable individuals from 600 BC to the present day; it is one of the most viewed videos on the Nature Video YouTube channel with over 1.3 million views, forms part of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit, and was featured in "The Best American Infographics 2015". Network Earth explores nature's resilience and the interconnections between all life on Earth, accompanying a research paper published in Nature and winning the 2017 Best Scientific Video award of the National Science Foundation.

Wonder Net, developed in collaboration with Albert-László Barabási at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University, includes 8 data sculptures representing 8 different "data-stories" (such as art network, flavor network, and fake news network) and was presented at the IEEE VIS 2018 Arts Program in Berlin. Forma Fluens uses the world’s largest doodle data set by Google Quick Draw and was presented at the 123 DATA design exhibition in Paris. News Explorer is a web application that provides a new interface for news analysis and discovery. Rise of Partisanship illustrates the party polarization of the House of Representatives through time and 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.

In 2015, the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards recognized Rise of Partisanship with a Gold Medal in Data visualization, and Charting Culture with an Honorable Mention in the Motion Infographic category. In 2016, Watson News Explorer was named a finalist for Websites & Platforms at Fast Company's Innovation by Design Award, and IBM Watson News Explorer won a Silver Medal in the Commercial Project category at the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards. In 2017, Network Earth won Best Scientific Video in the Vizzies Visualization Challenge organized by the National Science Foundation and Popular Science, while Forma Fluens received an Honorable Mention in the Unusual category at the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards.

In 2019, AI Portraits was named a Webby People's Voice Award Winner in NetArt. In 2020, 150 Years of Nature won Best Data Design at Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards, and was named both a Webby Award Winner and a Webby People's Voice Award Winner.