Google Israel R&D head Yossi Matias moving to global role

• Published date: 18 April 2024
• Author: Assaf Gilead
• Publication title: Globes (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

Matias, a senior researcher in AI at Tel Aviv University, joined Google in 2006 as head of the Tel Aviv development center, at the same time as the activity of Google's Haifa development center was managed by Dr. Yoelle Maarek, who was in charge of the development of Google Suggest. In 2008, Maarek left to manage Yahoo's development center and the following year the Haifa and Tel Aviv development centers merged, with Matias in charge of all of Google's development in Israel

Altogether, Google employs about 2,000 people in R&D in Israel, dealing with cloud computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and chips.

Since 2014, Matias has been Vice President, Engineering & Research at Google. He will now move to company headquarters in Mountain View, California, where research takes place on machine learning, quantum computing, and applied science. This activity is currently headed by Google's Senior Vice President of Technology and Society James Manyika, to whom Matias will report.

In an email to employees on restructuring of Google's research activity today, CEO Sundar Pichai writes: "Last year we created Google DeepMind, bringing together the Google Brain team, DeepMind, and other researchers specifically focused on creating increasingly capable and general AI systems.

"The progress in just one year has been incredible: Gemini...