Prof. Yossi Matias Managing Director, Israel R&D Center, Google
Yossi Matias is a Senior Engineering Director in Google's Search. He is also the managing director of Google's Israel R&D Center, with overall responsibility for Google research, development, and technology innovation in Israel. Under his leadership, the Israeli center has developed visible and core technologies in the areas of Search, Data Analytics, Gmail, YouTube, and Internet scale infrastructure (some highlights here), as well as pioneered an initiative of bringing online heritage collections such as the Yad Vashem photo archive and the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls. Matias joined Google in 2006 to establish the Tel-Aviv R&D Center. Subsequently, he merged the Tel Aviv and Haifa centers into a single strategic Israeli R&D center, which is part of Google's global Engineering organization. He is also the executive lead for Google's university research program across Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and was responsible for technology innovation in YouTube and Data Analytics across EMEA. Prof. Matias is also on the CS faculty of Tel Aviv University (on leave), and formerly a research scientist at Bell Laboratories and a visiting professor at Stanford. He earned his PhD (with distinction) from Tel Aviv University and his MSc (with excellence) from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Previously he served in the Israeli IDF as an Israeli Air Force pilot. Matias has authored over 100 scientific and technological research papers and is the inventor of over 25 patents, in the areas of data analytics, algorithms for massive data sets (aka big data), data streams and synopses, parallel algorithms and systems, data compression, data and information management systems, security and privacy, video processing, and Internet technologies. He pioneered some of the early technologies for the effective analysis of massive data sets, internet privacy and contextual search. He served as Chair of the ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award committee, on the founding steering committee of the Israeli Academic Grid, and was a member of a national committee evaluating strategies for Grid technologies; he was a program committee member and invited speaker in numerous scientific, technological and business conferences. Matias has been extensively involved over the years in the high tech industry in leadership roles as an entrepreneur and executive, in the areas of search technologies, internet privacy, database technologies and business intelligence. He founded in Bell Labs the Lucent Personalized Web Assistant project (1996), developing one of the early Internet privacy and anti-spam technologies (sold by Lucent to a CMGI company); he was co-founder and CEO of Zapper Technologies (1999), pioneering advanced contextual and personalized search technologies; he was the CTO and Chief Scientist of Hyperroll, leading the technology strategy of its high performance big data analytics solution for BI (acquired by Oracle). Matias is a recipient of the 2005 ACM-EATCS Goedel prize in Computer Science "for the profound impact on the theory and practice of the analysis of data streams". His work was instrumental in setting up a scientific field of algorithmics for big data massive data sets, and technologies now extensively used in industries involving big data. In 2009 he was elected an ACM Fellow for contributions to the analysis of large data sets and data streams. |