Amnon Shashua

Amnon Shashua (אמנון שעשוע; born May 26, 1960) is an Israeli computer scientist, businessman and philanthropist. He is the Sachs Professor of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the autonomous driving and driver-assistance technology company Mobileye, Co-founder of the artificial vision devices company OrCam, Founder and owner of ONE ZERO digital bank, and chairman of artificial intelligence company AI21 Labs.

He was ranked 20th among the top wealthiest people in Israel, in 2024.

Biography
Amnon Shashua was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, to parents of Iraqi origin. 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.

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 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.

Academic
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 has held the Sachs chair in computer science at the Hebrew University since 2007.

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.

Business
In 1995, Shashua founded CogniTens, which was sold to Hexagon AB in 2007. 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. 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.

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

In August 2017, Intel acquired Mobileye for approximately $15.3 billion. 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.

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

Awards and recognition
Shashua received his first prize in the 2004 Kaye Innovation award, and the 2005 Mifal HaPayis Landau Prize for Science and Research in the area of Exact Sciences - Robotics.

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

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

In 2020, he was awarded the Dan David Prize for his work in Artificial Intelligence.

In 2022, he was awarded the Mobility Innovator Award and was inducted into The Automotive Hall of Fame.

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

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

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

Philanthropy
Shashua, along with his family, has engaged in various philanthropic activities through the Shashua Family Foundation.

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. Together, they also founded The Social Solidarity Foundation, a public benefit organization that assists in the development and growth of small businesses in Israel. Their daughter, Inbar Shashua Bar-Nir, serves as chairwoman of the board.

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.

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

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.