Professor Amnon Shashua wins Dan David Award for his outstanding contributions to AI

Professor Amnon Shashua is currently the Senior Vice President of Intel Corporation and President and CEO of Mobileye, an Intel subsidiary

Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CEO of Intel subsidiary Mobileye, has won the 2020 Dan David Award in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

The Dan David Award is one of the most prestigious and valuable awards in the world. It is headquartered at Tel Aviv University in Israel and awards three awards each year to outstanding individuals and organizations around the world, each with a prize of $1 million. The winners are selected based on their outstanding achievements and contributions in a specific field of the year, each of which represents a time period category. This year, the organizing committee selected the fields of cultural preservation and revitalization (representing the "past"), gender equality (representing the "present"), and artificial intelligence (representing the "future").

Shashua is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To date, he has published more than 120 papers in the field of artificial intelligence in machine learning and computer vision, holds more than 45 invention patents, and has won the Best Paper Award for his scientific contributions in the fields of computer vision and machine learning. He also pioneered the application of tensor analysis in computer vision and machine learning, contributing to people's understanding of the basics of deep learning.

Professor Shashua’s research and interests sowed the seeds for many of his future startups. In 1999, he co-founded Mobileye, which mainly develops AI-based driver assistance systems and autonomous driving technology. To date, more than 55 million cars around the world are equipped with Mobileye technology. In 2017, Mobileye was acquired by Intel Corporation, and Professor Shashua began to serve as Intel’s senior vice president and became a member of Intel’s executive leadership team. Since then, he has also co-founded and served as co-CEO of OrCam, a company that aims to use computer vision and natural language processing technology to help people with visual and hearing impairments. OrCam’s products were also selected as one of the "100 Best Inventions" of 2019 selected by Time Magazine. Recently, Shashua has co-founded two AI startups in the fields of natural language understanding and digital banking.

In 2019, Professor Shashua was selected as the Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year by the American Society for Imaging Science and Technology for his important contributions to computer vision and machine learning.

In his acceptance speech for the 2020 Dan David Award, Professor Shashua said: “I am honored to be awarded the 2020 Dan David Award in Artificial Intelligence together with Dr. Hassabis, and to be one of many outstanding winners. Using artificial intelligence technology to make modern life better has always been my main motivation. Artificial intelligence has great potential to benefit mankind, and this award will help more people understand the charm of artificial intelligence.”

Professor Shashua will be among five other winners to attend the Dan David Prize ceremony in Tel Aviv in May this year.