Daniel Pontillo

I am a senior machine learning engineer at Woven By Toyota working on perception for autonomous vehicles.

I was a post-doc in the Human Reinforcement Learning Team in the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives at the École Normale Supérieure investigating the role of reinforcement learning in language acquisition.

I did my PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at University of Rochester under the supervision of Michael K. Tanenhaus. My work was focused on the relationship between language processing and visual search. I designed and conducted a range of eye tracking experiments aimed at better understanding when and why people name the objects in their visual environment.

Publications

Pontillo, D. F., Spivey, M. J., and Tanenhaus, M. K. (2026). Linguistic-visual routines and name activation in visual world studies of spoken word recognition. Brain Research, 150330. (link)

Kurumada, C., Brown, M., Bibyk, S., Pontillo, D., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2014). Is it or isn't it: Listeners make rapid use of prosody to infer speaker meanings. Cognition, 133, 335-342.

Jaeger, T. F., Pontillo, D, and Graff, P. (2012). Comment on "Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa." Science 335, 1042.

Jaeger, T. F., Graff, P., Croft, W., & Pontillo, D. (2011). Mixed effect models for genetic and areal dependencies in linguistic typology. Linguistic Typology, 15, 281.

Pontillo, D. F., Kinsman, T. B., & Pelz, J. B. (2010). SemantiCode: using content similarity and database-driven matching to code wearable eyetracker gaze data. In Proceedings of the 2010 Symposium on Eye-Tracking Research & Applications (pp. 267-270). ACM.

Hu, F., Hao, Q., Qiu, M., Wu, Y., Frye, J., Pontillo, D. F., Phillips, D. (2009). Low-power electroencephalography sensing data RF transmission: hardware architecture and test. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Medical-grade wireless networks (pp. 57-62). ACM.

Patents

Pelz, J. B., Kinsman, T. B., Pontillo, D. F., Munn, S. M., Harrington, N. R., & Hsieh, B. B. K. (2012). U.S. Patent No. 20,120,328,150. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Presentations, Proceedings and Posters

Pontillo, D., Salverda, A. P., Tanenhaus, M. K. (2015). Flexible Use of Phonological and Visual Memory in Language-mediated Visual Search. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Kurumada, C., Brown, M., Bibyk, S., Pontillo, D. F., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2013). Incremental processing in the pragmatic interpretation of contrastive prosody. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 846-851). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Pontillo, D., Salverda, A. P., Tanenhaus, M. K. (2013, March). Implicit Naming in the Visual World Paradigm. Poster presented at the 26th annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Columbia, SC.

Pontillo, D., Salverda, A. P., Tanenhaus, M. K. (2012, September). Cohort effects in the visual world paradigm are mediated by visual/perceptual representations activated by spoken words, not phonological codes activated by displayed pictures. AMLaP 2012, Riva del Garda.

Salverda, A. P., Pontillo, D., Tanenhaus, M. K. (2012, September). Visual search for objects is influenced by phonologically-mediated visual information. Poster at AMLaP 2012, Riva del Garda.

Munn, S. M., Pontillo, D., Witwer, J. et al. (2009). Obtaining and analyzing gaze fixations on volumes-of-interest in real 3D environments.