Amnon Shashua

Education

Shashua received his B.Sc in mathematics and computer science from Tel-Aviv University in 1985 and his M.Sc in computer science in 1989 from the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Shimon Ullman. His Ph.D in brain and cognitive sciences was received from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while working at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in 1993; and his postdoctoral training under Tomaso Poggio at the center for biological and computational learning at MIT.

He has been on the computer science faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 1996. In 1999 he was appointed as an associate professor and in 2003 received full professorship. Between the years 2002-2005 he was the head of the engineering and computer science school at the Hebrew University. Shashua currently holds the Sachs chair in computer science at the Hebrew University. Over the years, Shashua has published over 100 papers in the field of machine learning and computational vision.

His work includes early visual processing of saliency and grouping mechanisms, visual recognition and learning, image synthesis for animation and graphics, theory of computer vision in the areas of multiple-view geometry and multi-view tensors, multilinear algebraic systems in Vision and Learning and primal/dual optimization for approximate inference in MRF and Graphical models and recently on deep layered networks.

Awards and recognition

His work on multiple-view geometry received the "best paper award" at ECCV'2000 and the Honorable Mention to the MARR Prize in ICCV'2001. His work on graphical models has received a "Best Paper" award category at UAI'2008. Amnon Shashua received the first prize of the 2004 Kaye Innovation award, and the 2005 Landau Award for Science and Research in the area of exact sciences - Robotics. Since 2007 he became the incumbent of the newly formed Sachs chair in computer science.

Business

In 1995 he founded CogniTens, which was sold to Hexagon AB in 2007. In 1999, Shashua co-founded Mobileye (NYSE: MBLY) and currently serves as chairman and CTO. Mobileye is a company that developed systems-on-chip and computer vision algorithms for detecting pedestrians, vehicles, traffic signs, lanes and more for driving assistance systems. Mobileye is also developing autonomous driving technology. On August 1, 2014 Mobileye launched its IPO on the NYSE which was the biggest Israeli IPO ever in the US raising approximately $1B at a market cap of $5.3B.

In 2010, Shashua co-founded Orcam, an Israeli company which launched an assistive device for the visually impaired based on computer vision capabilities.