Yossi Matias

❧

Wikipedia

Yossi Matias
יוסי מטיאס
Known forStreaming Algorithms, Sketches, Google Trends, Google Autocomplete, Conversational AI, Google Duplex, AI for Social Good, Flood Forecasting, Speculative Decoding, LLM Factuality Med-Palm, AI Co-Scientist
AwardsGödel Prize, ACM Fellow, Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsGoogle, Weizmann Institute of Science, Tel Aviv University

Yossi Matias (Hebrew: יוסי מטיאס) is an Israeli-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and technology executive. He serves as Vice President of Engineering & Research at Google and is the Head of Google Research. Matias was the founding managing director of Google’s Center in Israel.[1]

Matias has been part of the leadership team of Google Research, serving as the global executive lead for initiatives in Health AI,[2][3] Crisis Response, and Climate AI,[4] and leads work in Conversational AI.

For more than a decade, he was a key figure in Google Search leadership, helping develop and oversee products and features including Google Trends, Google Autocomplete, Search Console, and search experiences related to weather, sports, and dictionaries. In 2024, Matias relocated to Silicon Valley to lead Google Research globally, overseeing the company’s worldwide research activities.[5]

Matias established the Research and Development Center of Google in Israel.[6] growing it to over 2500 on staff,[7] with efforts working on Search, AI, Waze, Cloud and Chip design. He led the development of Google products such as Google Trends, Google Insights for Search, Google Suggest, Google Visualization API, Ephemeral IDs for IoT.[8]

He led efforts in Conversational AI including Google Duplex,[9][10] Call Screen,[11] Live Caption,[12] Live Relay,[13] Recorder,[14] and Euphonia.[15] He led development of Generative AI breakthroughs including Speculative Decoding[16] and Factuality,[17] and led advancing Healthcare and Scientific discovery with AI[18] including Med-Palm,[19][20][21] AMIE,[22][23] MedGemma,[24] and AI Co-Scientist.[25]

He pioneered an initiative to bring cultural and heritage collections online, such as the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum archive,[26] the Dead Sea Scrolls,[27] and the Nelson Mandela Archive,[28] which along with Google Art Project seeded up Google Cultural Institute.[29] He is leading a global initiative for Crisis Response[30] and Flood Forecasting.[31]

Matias is the executive lead and founder of Google's Campus Tel Aviv,[32] a technology hub for promoting innovation and entrepreneurship and birthplace of programs such as Campus for Moms and LaunchPad, which has evolved into Launchpad Accelerator, and LaunchPad Studio for AI & ML focused startups.[33] He is a founding lead of Google's AI for Social Good initiative.

Prof. Matias is on the computer science faculty at Tel Aviv University, and previously a research scientist at Bell Labs and a visiting professor at Stanford. He published over 200 papers in diverse areas including data analysis, algorithms for massive data sets, data streams and synopses, parallel algorithms and systems, data compression, data and information management systems, security and privacy, video processing, Internet technologies, AI for health, machine learning and language models. He is the inventor of over 80 patents. He pioneered some of the early technologies for the effective analysis of big data, internet privacy and contextual search.

Matias is a recipient of Gödel Prize,[34] an ACM Fellow[35] and a recipient of Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award[36] for seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large scale data analytics.[37]

References

  1. ↑ Ungerleider, Neal (2010-11-03). "Google Israel's Chief Geek Yossi Matias Offers a Peek Inside the R&D Center | Fast Company | Business + Innovation". Fast Company. Retrieved 2013-10-22.
  2. ↑ Yossi Matias and, Greg Corrado (February 23, 2023). "Google Research, 2022 & beyond: Health". AI Blog. Retrieved February 23, 2023.
  3. ↑ Greg Corrado and, Yossi Matias (March 14, 2023). "Our latest health AI research updates". The Keyword. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  4. ↑ Matias, Yossi (November 2, 2022). "How we're using AI to help address the climate crisis". The Keyword. Retrieved November 2, 2022.
  5. ↑ "Google Israel R&D head Yossi Matias moving to global role". Globes. 2024-04-18. Retrieved 2024-05-06.
  6. ↑ "Decode with Google 15RAEL - 15 years of innovation made in Israel: Yossi Matias". YouTube. 27 April 2021.
  7. ↑ Shahaf, Tal (2023-04-02). "Yossi Matias: the man who develops Google's main tools (Hebrew)". tech12. Retrieved 2023-04-03.
  8. ↑ "Growing Eddystone with Ephemeral Identifiers: A Privacy Aware & Secure Open Beacon Format". 2016-04-14. Retrieved 2017-11-06.
  9. ↑ Leviathan, Yaniv; Matias, Yossi (May 8, 2018). "Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone". Google AI Blog. Retrieved May 10, 2018.
  10. ↑ Nieva, Richard (May 9, 2018). "Exclusive: Google's Duplex could make Assistant the most lifelike AI yet". CNET. CBS Interactive. Retrieved May 9, 2018.
  11. ↑ Singleton, Micah (October 9, 2018). "Google Assistant will screen spam calls on the Pixel 3". The Verge. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
  12. ↑ Michelle Tadmor-Ramanovich and, Nadav Bar (October 29, 2019). "On-Device Captioning with Live Caption". AI Blog. Retrieved October 29, 2019.
  13. ↑ Caduri, Sapir (May 7, 2019). "Easier phone calls without voice or hearing". The Keyword. Retrieved May 7, 2019.
  14. ↑ Lin, Sherry (October 22, 2019). "Record a lecture, name that song: Pixel 4 uses on-device AI". The Keyword. Retrieved October 22, 2019.
  15. ↑ Cattiau, Julie (May 7, 2019). "How AI can improve products for people with impaired speech". The Keyword. Retrieved May 7, 2019.
  16. ↑ Yaniv Leviathan, Yossi Matias. "Looking back at speculative decoding".
  17. ↑ Honovich, Or; Aharoni, Roee; Herzig, Jonathan; Taitelbaum, Hagai; Kukliansy, Doron; Cohen, Vered; Scialom, Thomas; Szpektor, Idan; Hassidim, Avinatan; Matias, Yossi (2022). "TRUE: Re-evaluating Factual Consistency Evaluation". arXiv:2204.04991 [cs.CL].
  18. ↑ Matias, Yossi (4 March 2025). "Advancing healthcare and scientific discovery with AI".
  19. ↑ "Med-Palm".
  20. ↑ Singhal, Karan; et al. (2023). "Large language models encode clinical knowledge". Nature. 620 (7972): 172–180. Bibcode:2023Natur.620..172S. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06291-2. PMC 10396962. PMID 37438534.
  21. ↑ Singhal, Karan; et al. (2025). "Toward expert-level medical question answering with large language models". Nature Medicine. 31 (3): 943–950. doi:10.1038/s41591-024-03423-7. PMC 11922739. PMID 39779926.
  22. ↑ Tu, Tao; Schaekermann, Mike; Palepu, Anil; Saab, Khaled; Freyberg, Jan; Tanno, Ryutaro; Wang, Amy; Li, Brenna; Amin, Mohamed; Cheng, Yong; Vedadi, Elahe; Tomasev, Nenad; Azizi, Shekoofeh; Singhal, Karan; Hou, Le; Webson, Albert; Kulkarni, Kavita; Mahdavi, S. Sara; Semturs, Christopher; Gottweis, Juraj; Barral, Joelle; Chou, Katherine; Corrado, Greg S.; Matias, Yossi; Karthikesalingam, Alan; Natarajan, Vivek (2025). "Towards conversational diagnostic artificial intelligence". Nature. 642 (8067): 442–450. Bibcode:2025Natur.642..442T. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08866-7. PMID 40205050.
  23. ↑ McDuff, Daniel; Schaekermann, Mike; Tu, Tao; Palepu, Anil; Wang, Amy; Garrison, Jake; Singhal, Karan; Sharma, Yash; Azizi, Shekoofeh; Kulkarni, Kavita; Hou, Le; Cheng, Yong; Liu, Yun; Mahdavi, S. Sara; Prakash, Sushant; Pathak, Anupam; Semturs, Christopher; Patel, Shwetak; Webster, Dale R.; Dominowska, Ewa; Gottweis, Juraj; Barral, Joelle; Chou, Katherine; Corrado, Greg S.; Matias, Yossi; Sunshine, Jake; Karthikesalingam, Alan; Natarajan, Vivek (2025). "Towards accurate differential diagnosis with large language models". Nature. 642 (8067): 451–457. Bibcode:2025Natur.642..451M. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08869-4. PMC 12158753. PMID 40205049.
  24. ↑ Sellergren, Andrew; et al. (2025). "MedGemma Technical Report". arXiv:2507.05201 [cs.AI].
  25. ↑ Gottweis, Juraj; et al. (2025). "Towards an AI co-scientist". arXiv:2502.18864 [cs.AI].
  26. ↑ Fisher, Allyn. "Google widens access to Israel's Holocaust archives". Uk.reuters.com. Archived from the original on February 1, 2013. Retrieved 2013-10-22.
  27. ↑ "Digital Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem - The Project". Dss.collections.imj.org.il. Retrieved 2013-10-22.
  28. ↑ "Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory". Archive.nelsonmandela.org. 2004-09-21. Retrieved 2013-10-22.
  29. ↑ "Google Cultural Institute". Retrieved 2013-10-22.
  30. ↑ Matias, Yossi (2017-07-25). "Helping people in a crisis". Google the Keyword. Retrieved 2017-11-06.
  31. ↑ Matias, Yossi (2018-09-24), Keeping people safe with AI-enabled flood forecasting, Google the Keyword, retrieved 2018-09-24
  32. ↑ "Google Campus". Campustelaviv.com. 2013-09-24. Retrieved 2013-10-22.
  33. ↑ "Apply to Google Developers Launchpad Studio for AI & ML focused startups". Google Developers Blog. 2017-07-26. Retrieved 2017-11-06.
  34. ↑ "2005 Godel Prize". Sigact.org. Archived from the original on 2016-08-09. Retrieved 2013-10-22.
  35. ↑ "Yossi Matias - Award Winner". Fellows.acm.org. Retrieved 2013-10-22.
  36. ↑ "Yossi Matias - ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award".
  37. ↑ Alon, Noga; Matias, Yossi; Szegedy, Mario (1999-02-01). "The Space Complexity of Approximating the Frequency Moments". Journal of Computer and System Sciences. 58 (1): 137–147. doi:10.1006/jcss.1997.1545. ISSN 0022-0000.