Ciro Donalek is a leading expert in Artificial Intelligence and data visualization. As a Computational Staff Scientist at Caltech he successfully applied Machine Learning techniques to many different scientific fields, co-authoring over a hundred publications featured in major journals (e.g., Nature, Neural Networks, IEEE Big Data, Bioinformatics). He holds several patents in the fields of AI and 3D Data Visualization, co-authoring the ones that define the Virtualitics AI platform. During his 20 years career in Data Science he has been awarded numerous grants and research fellowships.
Dr. Donalek has also pioneered some of the uses of 3D and Mixed Reality for data visualization, AI-assisted data exploration and collaboration, leading the iViz project at Caltech (Virtualitics Explore precursor).
Dr. Donalek is passionate about teaching and public outreach and has given many invited talks around the world on Machine Learning, Immersive technologies and Ethical, Interpretable and Explainable AI.
He also has a Minor Planet named after him as a reward for the work done in the automatic classification of celestial bodies and has been part of the small group that built the Big Picture, the single largest real astronomical image in the world, 152 feet wide and 20 feet tall, currently installed at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, the most-visited public observatory in the world (with 1.5 million visitors a year).
Dr. Donalek holds a PhD in Computational Sciences / Artificial Intelligence (University Federico II of Naples, Italy) and a MS in Computer Science (University of Salerno, Italy). He is married with two children.
