| MN | maxnicosia.com |

MASSIMO
NICOSIA

Role

Staff Research Engineer
Google DeepMind

Hi, I am Massimo and I work at Google DeepMind (Zürich). Here I focus on multimodal understanding and generation capabilities of large language models. Whenever I can, I like to make music with my guitar and by mixing samples.

01 / Intro

Understanding and Generation with Vision Language Models

I am a core Gemini contributor and I specialize in the domain of non-natural images (charts, infographics, diagrams). I work on image generation, image understanding, ojbect detection and evaluation across pretraining and post-training.

In my past at Google, I worked on many things including multilinguality, tabular data understanding and semantic parsing.

I earned my PhD from the University of Trento, where I worked on structural kernels and deep learning methods for question answering and other tasks.

Latest Updates

News

Nov 2025
Deep Learning Indaba 2025. I will deliver a tutorial on Multimodal Reasoning during the Learnathon.
July 2025
Attending ACL 2025. I'll be in Vienna for ACL, see you there!
Jan 2024
Gemini 2.5 Tech Report is out. For 2.5, I focused on developing the model’s core capabilities in object detection and localization, specifically for non-natural images.
03 / Career Path

Curriculum Vitae

2023 — Present

Google DeepMind

Research Engineer

Focus: structured and multimodal data for Gemini pretraining and post-training, infographics generation with Nanobanana.

2018 — 2023

Google Research

Software Engineer in Research

Focus: i18n of semantic parsing models for the Assistant and YouTube, conversational semantic parsing, question answering.

2014 — 2018

University of Trento

PhD in Computer Science

Thesis on structural kernels and neural network models for question answering systems. Advisors: Prof. A. Moschitti.

2013 — 2015

Qatar Computing Research Institute

Research Associate

Research and software engineering (NLP and Machine Learning) in the Arabic Language Technologies group, first as a research associate and then as a consultant.