About Yossi Matias

Yossi Matias is Vice President, Engineering, at Google, leading strategic efforts in Search and AI Research, and is the global lead of Google’s Crisis Response effort. He is the Managing Director of Google Center in Israel which he established, and oversees Google’s site in Bangalore.

Yossi’s Google Search efforts include Google Autocomplete, Google Trends, Search Live Results and Search Console. He pioneered Conversational AI innovations including Google Duplex (on Popular Science’s “Best New Software of 2018”), rethinking the phone experience with Call Screen and Hold for Me, leading helpful innovations including Live Caption, Live Relay, Recorder, and Euphonia, and transforming how we can read any web page out loud with Google Assistant Read It. Yossi is leading Crisis Response efforts providing AI-based actionable information to people during crises with SOS Alerts and Public Alerts, early warnings with flood forecasting (Fortune’s “Change The World” list), wildfire updates, earthquake detection and covid-19 alerts.

Yossi is a founding lead of Google’s AI for Social Good initiative. He previously pioneered an initiative of bringing online hundreds of heritage collections, seeding Google’s Cultural Institute. He is the founding executive lead of Google for Startups Campus in Tel Aviv, of Mind the Gap, and of Google’s global Launchpad program.

In addition to his experience as entrepreneur and executive, Prof. Matias is on the Computer Science faculty at Tel Aviv University, and previously a Research Scientist at Bell Labs and visiting professor at Stanford. He published over 100 papers and is the inventor of over 60 patents. He pioneered some of the early technologies for the effective analysis of big data, internet privacy, and contextual search. He is a board member of IATI – the Israeli Advanced Technology Industries, and co-chair of its multi-national forum, a board member of She Codes, and a member of a national committee about strategy for AI.

Yossi is a recipient of the 2005 Godel Prize for the profound impact on the theory and practice of the analysis of data streams and is a 2009 ACM Fellow. He is a recipient of the 2019 ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large-scale data analytics.