Yoav Shoham

Overview

Yoav Shoham is an Israeli-American computer scientist. He was born on 22 January 1956 in Israel ^[1]. He is also known for starting the AI Index and for co-founding AI21 Labs. He is professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University ^[1].

Education and early research

Shoham earned a B.Sc. from the Technion and a PhD from Yale University, which he completed in 1987 ^[1]. His research spans artificial intelligence, game theory and multi-agent systems. Multi-agent systems study how several software programs, or agents, act and interact when each pursues its own goals. Game theory provides the mathematical tools for modelling such interactions ^[2].

Main contributions

Shoham initiated the AI Index, a project that tracks progress in artificial intelligence. It launched publicly at the end of 2017 ^[1]. An index in this sense is a set of measurements tracked over time, so that readers can see how a field changes from one year to the next. Earlier in his career he founded TradingDynamics in 1999, which was sold to Ariba in 2000. In 2011 he founded Katango, which was sold to Google in 2013, and in 2014 he founded Timeful, which was sold to Google in 2015 ^[1].

His awards include the Allen Newell Award (2012), the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize (2017) and the IJCAI Research Excellence Award (2019) ^[1].

Career

Shoham was formerly a principal scientist at Google ^[2]. In November 2017 he co-founded AI21 Labs with Ori Goshen and Amnon Shashua, and he serves as the company's chairman ^[3][2]. The company's founding and its later products are described in its own entry in this archive.

Influence

Shoham's influence comes from three areas: research in multi-agent systems and game theory, the AI Index as a public record of progress, and the company he helped found, which built language models and writing tools. His earlier companies were sold to Ariba and Google, and his awards are listed above.