Marzia Polito

Marzia Polito is a Research Scientist, Entrepreneur, Engineer and Product Manager.

In 2007 she joined Alex Backer in founding Whozat, The People Search Engine, in Alatadena, California, USA.

From 2002 to 2006 she was a Senior Research Scientist with Intel Corp., Santa Clara, California, USA, in the Applications Research Lab. From 1999 to 2002 she was a Research Instructor in the Math Departement and then a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Computational Vision Lab at California Institue of Technology in Pasadena, California, USA. She holds a Laurea (BS) in Matematica from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, a Perfezionamento (PHD) in Matematica from Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy. At Caltech, she attended several classes in Engineering Management. Marzia started her research career in Mathematics, more precisely in Algebraic Geometry. Her B.S. thesis is on quotients of algebraic varieties. Her Ph.D. thesis is on cohomology of moduli spaces of algebraic curves.  At Caltech her interests shifted towards Computer Vision and Machine Learning. She transferred to the Computational Vision Lab  She worked on dimensionality reduction and human motion detection. In the Application Research Lab of Intel Corporation, she worked on several different application of Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Performance Analysis, and Large Scale Data Mining.  During this period she developed a strong interest for applications of vision and learning to the World Wide Web. This leads her to a new career step, co-founding Whozat, The People Search Engine. Marzia is the author of several publications and filed patents.