Amnon Shashua

Amnon Shashua was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, to parents of Iraqi origin.^[4] From a young age, he was fascinated with computers, a field that was in its early stages of development. He attended the ORT school in Givatayim for his early education in computer engineering.^[4]

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^[5] under the supervision of Shimon Ullman titled "Structural Saliency". 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.^[6] Shashua has held the Sachs chair in computer science at the Hebrew University since 2007.^[7]

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.^{[citation needed]}

In 1995, Shashua founded CogniTens, which was sold to Hexagon AB in 2007.^[8] In 1999, Shashua co-founded Mobileye, a company that develops systems-on-chip and computer vision algorithms for driving assistance systems, as well as autonomous driving technology.^[9] On August 1, 2014, Mobileye launched its IPO on the NYSE which was the biggest Israeli IPO ever in the US raising approximately $1 billion at a market cap of $5.3 billion.^[10]

In 2010, Shashua co-founded OrCam, an Israeli company which launched an assistive device for the visually impaired based on computer vision capabilities.^[11]

In August 2017, Intel acquired Mobileye for approximately $15.3 billion.^[12][13] Shashua became a senior vice president at Intel, in addition to his title of President and CEO of Mobileye. In 2017, he also co-founded AI21 Labs.^[14]

In October 2022, Mobileye went public again, trading on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange with Shashua as its CEO.^[15]

Shashua received his first prize in the 2004 Kaye Innovation award,^[16] and the 2005 Mifal HaPayis Landau Prize for Science and Research in the area of Exact Sciences - Robotics.^[17][18]

On Israeli Independence Day 2017, Shashua was chosen to light a torch at the national ceremony on Mt. Herzl.^[19]

In 2019, Shashua was recognized by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology as the Electronic Imaging (EI) Scientist of the Year.^[20][21]

In 2020, he was awarded the Dan David Prize for his work in Artificial Intelligence.^[22][23]

In 2022, he was awarded the Mobility Innovator Award and was inducted into The Automotive Hall of Fame.^[24][25]

In 2023, he was awarded MotorTrend's first Software-Defined Vehicle Innovator (SDVI) Award.^[26]

In 2023, he was awarded Israel Prize in the category lifetime achievement and exceptional contribution to the nation.^[27]

In 2023, Prof. Shashua was appointed as an honorary professor at the Global Institute of Future Technology of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.^[28]

Shashua, along with his family, has engaged in various philanthropic activities through the Shashua Family Foundation.^[29]

Shashua's wife, Anat Ramaty Shashua, is president of the Foundation as well as chairwoman of the Orr Shalom organization for children and youth at risk.^[29] Together, they also founded The Social Solidarity Foundation, a public benefit organization that assists in the development and growth of small businesses in Israel.^[30] Their daughter, Inbar Shashua Bar-Nir, serves as chairwoman of the board.^[31]

As of 2024, Shashua and his family have donated approximately $60 million to various charitable causes, focusing on promoting economic opportunities and supporting underrepresented populations in Israel. These populations include ultra-Orthodox communities, Israeli-Arabs, women in STEM fields, and peripheral communities.^[32]

The Shashua Family Foundation has also funded scholarships at Tel Aviv University (TAU), his alma mater.^[32]

In response to the economic challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the family established the WE-19 program, a $35 million fund designed to support approximately 2,000 small businesses affected by the pandemic.^[32]

• Shalev-Shwartz, S; Shammah, S; Shashua, A (2016). "Safe, multi-agent, reinforcement learning for autonomous driving". arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.03295. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1610.03295.
• Shalev-Shwartz, S; Shammah, S; Shashua, A (2017). "On a formal model of safe and scalable self-driving cars". arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.06374. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1708.06374.
• Shashua, A; Riklin-Raviv, T (2001). "The quotient image: Class-based re-rendering and recognition with varying illuminations". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 23 (2): 129–139. doi:10.1109/34.908962.
• Ullman, S; Sha'ashua, A (1988). "Structural saliency: The detection of globally salient structures using a locally connected network". Proceedings of the IEEE.
• Shashua, A; Hazan, T (2005). "Non-negative tensor factorization with applications to statistics and computer vision". Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning: 792–799. doi:10.1145/1102351.1102446.
• Shashua, A; Gdalyahu, Y; Hayun, G (2004). "Pedestrian detection for driving assistance systems: Single-frame classification and system level performance". IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium: 1–6. doi:10.1109/IVS.2004.1336388.
• Cohen, N; Sharir, O; Shashua, A (2015). "On the Expressive Power of Deep Learning: A Tensor Analysis". arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.05009. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1509.05009.
• Shashua, A; Levin, A (2002). "Ranking with large margin principle: Two approaches". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 15.
• Zass, R; Shashua, A (2008). "Probabilistic graph and hypergraph matching". IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition: 1–8. doi:10.1109/CVPR.2008.4587711.
• Dagan, E; Mano, O; Stein, GP; Shashua, A (2004). "Forward collision warning with a single camera". IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium: 37–42. doi:10.1109/IVS.2004.1336388.
• Wolf, L; Shashua, A (2003). "Learning over sets using kernel principal angles". Journal of Machine Learning Research. 4: 913–931.

• Ziv Shilon
• Dov Moran

• Amnon Shashua, academic page on Hebrew University of Jerusalem website.
• Amnon Shashua, One of the top 10 successful people of 2014, according to Calcalist.