Matteo Marsili

Role

Lecturer

Affiliation

ICTP

Matteo Marsili is interested in understanding how the interaction at the micro-scale can bring about “unintended consequences” in the collective behaviour of a systems of many interacting units, be they agents in a financial markets, firms in an economy, species in an ecosystem, genes in a regulatory network or neurons in the brain. Lately, he is focusing on the inverse problem of statistical learning, i.e. how to “make sense” of raw data, specially in the under-sampling regime where data is scarce and high-dimensional, and a priori information on “true” models is totally absent. In particular his research tries to to understand what “making sense” means, which is what our brain does in a task-free and context-free sense.

Matteo Marsili earned his PhD in theoretical physics at SISSA in 1994 and spent three years as postdoc in Manchester (UK) and Fribourg (CH). He returned to SISSA in 1997 as researcher. Since 2002 he’s at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, where he’s currently the head of the Quantitative Life Sciences Section (established in 2014).