Winner. Scientist of the Year 2019. Natural Sciences

Amnon Shashua

Academic title, degree: Ph.D.
Fields of science: Artificial Intelligence
Research interest: Computer Vision and Machine Learning
Institution: School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Position: Professor of Computer Science
Country: Israel

Amnon 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.

Shashua 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. From 2002 to 2005 he was the head of the engineering and computer science school at the Hebrew University. Shashua currently has held the Sachs chair in computer science at the Hebrew University since 2007.

Over the years, he has published over 100 papers in the field of machine learning and computational vision. Shashua's 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, primal/dual optimization for approximate inference in MRF and Graphical models, and (since 2014) deep layered networks.

Pivotal contributions to computer vision and machine learning, and for advancing autonomous driving and wearable assistive devices for the blind and visually-impaired, advanced driver assistance technology which is making roads safer worldwide.