Tomaso Armando Poggio (also known as Tomaso A. Poggio; born 11 September 1947 in Genoa, Italy) is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).^[1] He is an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a multi-institutional collaboration headquartered at the McGovern Institute since 2013.^[1]

Poggio earned his BA from Istituto Arecco and his PhD from the University of Genoa under the supervision of Prof. A. Borsellino. His research focuses on machine learning, neural networks, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and visual systems, including biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system, computational analyses of vision and learning in humans and machines, deep learning, and the visuo-motor control system in the fly. His notable students include Anya Hurlbert, Christof Koch, Partha Niyogi, and Gabriel Kreiman.

His research has always been interdisciplinary, exploring the problem of intelligence between brains and computers, having started at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany, in collaboration with Werner E. Reichardt, David C. Marr, and Francis H.C. Crick, among others. With Werner E. Reichardt, he characterized quantitatively the visuo-motor control system in the fly. With David Marr, he introduced the seminal idea of levels of analysis in computational neuroscience. Additionally, he and Torre introduced regularization as a mathematical framework to approach the ill-posed problems of vision and the key problem of learning from data.^[4]

He has made major contributions to learning theory, the computational theory of vision, the understanding of the fly's visual system, and the biophysics of computation. As one of the most cited computational neuroscientists, his work spans biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system to computational analyses of vision and learning in humans and machines.^[3] The citation for the 2009 Okawa Prize highlighted his "…outstanding contributions to the establishment of computational neuroscience, and pioneering researches ranging from the biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system to the computational analysis of vision and learning in humans and machines."

His recent work has focused on computational neuroscience in close collaboration with several physiology labs, investigating how our visual system learns to see and recognize scenes and objects.^[2] His current research focuses on the mathematics of deep learning and on the computational neuroscience of the visual cortex.

Poggio is a former Corporate Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation and a former director of PHZ Capital Partners, Inc., is a director of Mobileye, and was involved in starting, or investing in, several other high tech companies including Arris Pharmaceutical, nFX, Imagen, Digital Persona, and DeepMind. Among his PhD students and post-docs are some of today's leaders in the Science and in the Engineering of Intelligence, from Christof Koch (President and Chief Scientific Officer, Allen Institute) to Amnon Shashua (CEO and founder, Mobileye) and Demis Hassabis (CEO and founder, Deep Mind, and Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2024).

Poggio is an honorary member of the Neuroscience Research Program, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a founding fellow of AAAI, and a founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He received the Laurea Honoris Causa in Computer Engineering from the University of Pavia for the Volta Bicentennial in 2000, the 2003 Gabor Award, the 2009 Okawa Prize, and was named in 2009 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for "distinguished contributions to computational neuroscience, in particular, computational vision learning and regularization theory, biophysics of computation and models of recognition in the visual cortex".^[7,5,6] In addition, he received the 2014 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, won the first edition of the international scientific award "Ratio et spes" in 2020, and was awarded the ICCV 2021 Helmholtz Prize as well as the Kampe' de F'eriet Award and Plenary Lecture at IMPU 2022 in Milan, Italy.^[7,5,6]