Yannis Assael

International media

13/07/2024. Greeking out, Sifted by FT.
01/07/2023. KI macht Geschichte, MIT Technology Review.
24/04/2023. MIT names Wolfson Alumnus on Innovators Under 35 list, Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
23/03/2023. Yannis Assael - MIT's Innovators Under 35 Europe, MIT Technology Review.
13/07/2022. Alumni Profile - Yannis Assael, University of Oxford Inspired Research.
08/12/2021. Alumni profile: Yannis Assael, University of Oxford.
14/04/2021. Forbes names Wolfson Alumnus on 30 Under 30 list, Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
08/04/2021. Department alumnus Yannis Assael featured in Forbes 30 under 30 list for Europe, Dept. Computer Science, University of Oxford.
07/04/2021. 30 Under 30 Science & Healthcare, Forbes.
01/08/2020. How AI helps historians solve ancient puzzles, Financial Times.
22/10/2019. New research uses deep learning to restore ancient Greek texts, Dept. Computer Science, University of Oxford.
24/02/2016. Business Insider, Business Insider.

Greek media

18/01/2024. Σήμερα - MIT EmTech Europe, ΣΚΑΙ.
30/11/2023. Δελτίο Ειδήσεων, ΕΡΤ.
30/11/2023. 15 χρόνια Google στην Ελλάδα, Αθηναϊκό - Μακεδονικό Πρακτορείο Ειδήσεων.
01/05/2023. Η τεχνητή νοημοσύνη στην υπηρεσία του ανθρώπου, Αθηναίος - Κολλέγιο Αθηνών.
07/03/2023. Καινοτομίες με θετικό κοινωνικό αποτύπωμα, Οικονομική Επιθεώρηση.
26/09/2021. A.I. και Πολιτισμός, ΒΗΜΑgazino Πρόσωπα.
12/11/2020. Όταν η τεχνητή νοημοσύνη «μεταφράζει» τον ήχο, προς όφελος της εκπαίδευσης, Αθηναϊκό - Μακεδονικό Πρακτορείο Ειδήσεων.
19/08/2020. Γιάννης Ασσαέλ: «Φυσικά πιστεύω πως μπορούμε ν' αλλάξουμε τον κόσμο», Αθηναϊκό - Μακεδονικό Πρακτορείο Ειδήσεων.
Dr. Yannis Assael is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind specialising in Artificial Intelligence. He is featured in “MIT's Innovators Under 35” and “Forbes' 30 Under 30” lists of distinguished scientists in Europe, and serves as a Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence to the Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance. In 2013, he graduated from the Department of Applied Informatics of University of Macedonia. With full scholarships, he completed an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Oxford, finishing first in his year, followed by an MRes in Machine Learning at Imperial College London. In 2016, he returned to Oxford to pursue a DPhil degree, and after a series of research breakthroughs and entrepreneurial ventures, he started as a researcher at Google DeepMind. His contributions span audio-visual speech recognition, multi-agent communication, as well as AI for Culture and the study of damaged ancient texts. His research has been featured on the cover of the scientific journal Nature, and focuses on expanding and contributing to the greater good.

Education

DPhil in Machine Learning

2015 - 2019 University of Oxford
  • Supervisor: Shimon Whiteson, Nando de Freitas
  • Oxford – Google DeepMind Graduate Scholarship

MRes in Machine Learning

Distinction, 81.8%, 2nd best overall performance

2014 - 2015 Imperial College
  • Supervisor: Marc P. Deisenroth
  • HiPEDS Scholarship (EPSRC)

MSc in Computer Science

Distinction, 83.5%, best overall performance

2013 - 2014 University of Oxford
  • Supervisor: Nando de Freitas
  • Tony Hoare Prize for best overall performance
    in the MSc in Computer Science 2014
  • Hellenic State Scholarships Foundation (IKY)

Security in IT Summer School

Distinction A, ECTS 7.5

2011 Engineering College of Copenhagen (IHK)

Diploma of Applied Informatics

83.7%, 4-Years

2008 - 2013 University of Macedonia
  • Supervisor: Konstantinos G. Margaritis

High School

17.8 / 20

2002 - 2008 Anatolia College, Greece

Scholarships

Oxford - Google DeepMind Graduate Scholarship

full scholarship for DPhil in Machine Learning, 2015 - 2018.

Imperial College London

full scholarship for MRes program of "HiPEDS", 2014 - 2015.

Hellenic State Scholarships Foundation

full scholarship for MSc in University of Oxford, 2013-2014.

Advanced Training in Open Source Multimedia Instruments

Blender 3D Design, EU Media Program Scholarship, 2011 - Sofia, Bulgaria.

Training in Open Source Multimedia Instruments

Blender 3D Design, EU Media Program Scholarship, 2010 - Sofia, Bulgaria.

Honors & Awards

MIT Innovators Under 35 Europe

2023 MIT Technology Review

Featured on the cover of Nature journal

2022 Nature Publishing Group

Best paper award

2022 Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery - Global Open

Featured in top scholars of the Hellenic State Scholarships Foundation

2022 Event for the 70-year anniversary

Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe

2021 Science & Healthcare

Distinction in MRes in Machine Learning

2015 Imperial College London

Tony Hoare Prize for "Best overall performance in the MSc in Computer Science"

2014 University of Oxford

Distinction in MSc in Computer Science

2014 University of Oxford

1st place in University of Oxford: Machine Learning Competition

Michaelmas 2013 University of Oxford

Distinction in Security in IT

2011 Copenhagen University College of Engineering (IHK)

3rd place in the HTC "Grand" Competition

2010 HTC
  • A competition for Google Android developers, under the "airquality.gr" application.

Certifications

Certified Scrum Master (CSM®)

Scrum Alliance, 2021.

Google Scholar

Publications

1.Google Gemini Team. Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context, arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05530, 2024.
2.Mary Phuong, Matthew Aitchison, Elliot Catt, Sarah Cogan, Alexandre Kaskasoli, Victoria Krakovna, David Lindner, Matthew Rahtz, Yannis Assael, Sarah Hodkinson, Heidi Howard, Tom Lieberum, Ramana Kumar, Maria Abi Raad, Albert Webson, Lewis Ho, Sharon Lin, Sebastian Farquhar, Marcus Hutter, Gregoire Deletang, Anian Ruoss, Seliem El-Sayed, Sasha Brown, Anca Dragan, Rohin Shah, Allan Dafoe, Toby Shevlane. Evaluating frontier models for dangerous capabilities, arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.13793, 2024.
3.Thea Sommerschield, Yannis Assael, John Pavlopoulos, Vanessa Stefanak, Andrew Senior, Chris Dyer, John Bodel, Jonathan Prag, Ion Androutsopoulos, Nando de Freitas. Machine Learning for Ancient Languages: A Survey, Computational Linguistics, 2, 49, 1-44, MIT Press, 2023.
4.Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, Brendan Shillingford, Mahyar Bordbar, John Pavlopoulos, Marita Chatzipanagiotou, Ion Androutsopoulos, Jonathan Prag, Nando de Freitas. Restoring;attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks, Nature, 603, 7900, 280-283, Nature Publishing Group, 2022.
5.Ziga Avsec, Vikram Agarwal, Daniel Visentin, Joseph R Ledsam, Agnieszka Grabska-Barwinska, Kyle R Taylor, Yannis Assael, John Jumper, Pushmeet Kohli, David R Kelley. Effective gene expression prediction from sequence by integrating long-range interactions, Nature Methods, 18, 10, 1196-1203, Nature Publishing Group, 2021.
6.Brendan Shillingford, Yannis Assael, Misha Denil, . Interactive decoding of words from visual speech recognition models, arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.00692, 2021.
7.Angelos Mantelakis, Yannis Assael, Parviz Sorooshian, Ankur Khajuria, . Machine learning demonstrates high accuracy for disease diagnosis;prognosis in plastic surgery, Plastic;Reconstructive Surgery - Global Open, 9, 6, e3638, LWW, 2021.
8.Yi Yang, Brendan Shillingford, Yannis Assael, Miaosen Wang, Wendi Liu, Yutian Chen, Yu Zhang, Eren Sezener, Luis C Cobo, Misha Denil, Yusuf Aytar, Nando de Freitas. Large-scale multilingual audio visual dubbing, arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.03530, 2020.
9.Takaki Makino, Hank Liao, Yannis Assael, Brendan Shillingford, Basilio Garcia, Otavio Braga, Olivier Siohan. Recurrent neural network transducer for audio-visual speech recognition, IEEE automatic speech recognition;understanding workshop (ASRU), 905-912, IEEE, 2019.
10.Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, Jonathan Prag, . Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2019.
11.Brendan Shillingford, Yannis Assael, Matthew W. Hoffman, Thomas Paine, Cían Hughes, Utsav Prabhu, Hank Liao, Hasim Sak, Kanishka Rao, Lorrayne Bennett, . Large-scale visual speech recognition, Interspeech, 4135-4139, 2019.
12.Archit Gupta, Brendan Shillingford, Yannis Assael, Thomas C Walters, . Speech bandwidth extension with WaveNet, IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio;Acoustics, 2019.
13.Yutian Chen, Yannis Assael, Brendan Shillingford, David Budden, Scott Reed, Heiga Zen, Quan Wang, Luis C Cobo, Andrew Trask, Ben Laurie, . Sample Efficient Adaptive Text-to-Speech, arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.10460, 2018.
14.Nikolaos D Goumagias, Dimitrios Hristu-Varsakelis, Yannis M Assael, . Using deep Q-learning to understand the tax evasion behavior of risk-averse firms, Expert Systems with Applications, 101, 258-270, Pergamon, 2018.
15.Rui Ponte Costa, Yannis Assael, Brendan Shillingford, Nando de Freitas, Tim Vogels, . Cortical microcircuits as gated-recurrent neural networks, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 272-283, 2017.
16.Yannis M Assael, Konstantinos D Antoniadis, Marc J Assael, . From analog timers to the era of machine learning: The case of the transient hot-wire technique, AIP Conference Proceedings, 1866, 1, 20001, AIP Publishing, 2017.
17.Yannis M Assael, Brendan Shillingford, Shimon Whiteson, Nando de Freitas, . LipNet: End-to-End Sentence-level Lipreading, GPU Technology Conference, 2017, 2016.
18.Hossam Mossalam, Yannis M Assael, Diederik M Roijers, Shimon Whiteson, . Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning, NIPS Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop, 2016.
19.Jakob N Foerster, Yannis M Assael, Nando de Freitas, Shimon Whiteson, . Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2016.
20.Jakob N Foerster, Yannis M Assael, Nando de Freitas, Shimon Whiteson, . Learning to Communicate to Solve Riddles with Deep Distributed Recurrent Q-Networks, IJCAI Workshop, 2016.
21.John-Alexander M. Assael, Niklas Wahlström, Thomas B Schön, Marc Peter Deisenroth, . Data-Efficient Learning of Feedback Policies from Image Pixels using Deep Dynamical Models, NIPS Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop, 2015.
22.John-Alexander M. Assael, Marc Peter Deisenroth, . From Pixels to Torques: Policy Learning using Deep Dynamical Convolutional Networks, Imperial College London, 2015.
23.Marc J Assael, Konstantinos D Antoniadis, Ifigeneia N Metaxa, Sofia K Mylona, John-Alexander M. Assael, Jiangtao Wu, Miaomiao Hu, . A Novel Portable Absolute Transient Hot-Wire Instrument for the Measurement of the Thermal Conductivity of Solids, International Journal of Thermophysics, 36, 11-Oct, 3083-3105, Springer US, 2015.
24.Charalampos S. Kouzinopoulos, John-Alexander M. Assael, Themistoklis K. Pyrgiotis, Konstantinos G. Margaritis, . A Hybrid Parallel Implementation of the Aho-Corasick;Wu-Manber Algorithms Using NVIDIA CUDA;MPI Evaluated on a Biological Sequence Database, International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, 24, 1, 1540001, World Scientific, 2015.
25.John-Alexander M. Assael, Ziyu Wang, Bobak Shahriari, Nando de Freitas, . Heteroscedastic Treed Bayesian Optimisation, NIPS Workshop on Bayesian Optimization, 2014.
26.John-Alexander M. Assael, Konstantinos Margaritis, . String Matching on hybrid parallel architectures, an approach using MPI;NVIDIA CUDA, http://www.yannisassael.com/publications/assael_uom_dissertation.pdf, University of Macedonia, 2013.
27.MJ Assael, Y. M. Assael, ML Huber, RA Perkins, Y Takata, . Correlation of the Thermal Conductivity of Normal;Parahydrogen from the Triple Point to 1000 K;up to 100 MPa, Journal of Physical;Chemical Reference Data, 40, 3, 033101-033101-13, American Institute of Physics, 2011.
28.M.J. Assael, K.E. Kakosimos, K.D. Antoniadis, John-Alexander M. Assael, . Applying Thermal Comfort Indices to Investigate Aspects of the Climate Change in Greece, International Review of Chemical Engineering, 2, 204-209, Praise Worthy Prize, 2010.
29.M.J. Assael, K.E. Kakosimos, A. Alexandridis, John-Alexander M. Assael, . Study;Application of Discomfort Indices in Greece, 7th National Scientific Chemical Engineering Conference, Patra, Proceedings, 2009.
30.M. J. Assael, John-Alexander M. Assael, K. Kakosimos, . Discomfort Indices - www.airquality.gr, Technographima (Journal of the Technical Chamber of Greece), 362, 13-Dec, Technical Chamber of Greece, 2008.

Patents

1.Brendan Shillingford, Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Joao Ferdinando Gomes de Freitas. Adaptive Visual Speech Recognition, US Patent App. 18/571,553, 2024.
2.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Brendan Shillingford. Interactive decoding of words from phoneme score distributions, US Patent App. 18/285,345, 2024.
3.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Brendan Shillingford. Training video data generation neural networks using video frame embeddings, WO Patent 053523A1, 2022.
4.Brendan Shillingford, Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Joao Ferdinando Gomes de Freitas. Cross-modal sequence distillation, US Patent 11250838, 2022.
5.Yutian Chen, Scott Ellison Reed, Aaron Gerard Antonius van den Oord, Oriol Vinyals, Heiga Zen, Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Brendan Shillingford, Joao Ferdinando Gomes de Freitas. Sample-efficient adaptive text-to-speech, US Patent App. 17/061, 437, 2021.
6.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Thomas Chadwick Walters, Archit Gupta, Brendan Shillingford. Bandwidth extension of incoming data using neural networks, WO Patent 221846A1, 2020.
7.Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Ioannis Alexandros Assael. Resolving time-delays using generative models, US Patent 0369946A1, 2019.
8.Brendan Shillingford, Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Joao Ferdinando Gomes De Freitas. Visual speech recognition by phoneme prediction, WO Patent 219968A1, 2019.

Thesis

DPhil ThesisDeep learning for communication: emergence, recognition and synthesis, University of Oxford, 2019. (link)
MRes ThesisFrom pixels to torques: policy learning using deep dynamical convolutional networks, Imperial College London, 2015.
MSc ThesisBayesian Optimization for Heteroscedastic Functions, University of Oxford, 2014. (link)
Bachelor ThesisString matching on hybrid parallel architectures, an approach using MPI and Nvidia CUDA, University of Macedonia, 2013.