Paul Viola

About Paul Viola

Paul Viola is a Distinguished Engineer at Zoox.Paul joined Zoox in December 2024, as a Distinguished Engineer focused on broad cross ORG technical initiatives. Previously Paul was the CTO under Mikhail Parakhin, with contributions spanning Web, Ads, Edge, and Windows. He led efforts to deliver a world-class news and feeds experience working with the News/Feeds, and Recoplatform teams. Additionally, he drove critical advancements in org-wide metrics, measurement, and analytics. Paul also spearheaded cross-team initiatives, including GPT-based personalization and the collaborative filter vteam. More broadly he worked to improve hiring practices, engineering excellence, and fostering cohesive innovation across the organizationPreviously he was the VP of Science for Prime Air. In addition to a Ph.D. from MIT, he is the holder of 35 patents in the areas of advanced machine learning, web search, data mining, and image processing. He is the author of more than 50 academic research papers, which are widely recognized and referenced.Paul is equally comfortable as a manager, architect, developer, and researcher. He started out as an academic, eventually becoming a Professor of Computer Science at MIT. There he developed hard-core highly engineered algorithms that have been adopted world wide. Examples include the world\'s fastest face detection and recognition system (used widely in digital cameras and surveillance); and the most reliable software for medical image registration (used in surgical planning). For his research he was the recipient of numerous academic prizes.Paul joined Microsoft in 2002 as a researcher, where his team applied machine learning to the analysis of documents, emails, and web pages. He then moved to Microsoft Bing, where he founded Bing\'s applied research effort in machine learning and text understanding. Paul\'s team grew to include both research and engineering, creating the algorithms that interpret users\' queries, control Bing\'s page composition, and create the search results page. It was during this tenure, that Bing pulled even with Google in many measurements of search relevance. Eventually Paul led a turn around of the Bing Ads team, bringing in new people and algorithms that greatly increased revenue.

Experience

1. Distinguished Engineer

   Zoox

   Dec 2024 — Present

Education

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  S.B., Computer Science

  1984 — 1988

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Ph.D., Computer Science

  1988 — 1995

Skills

• Software Development
• Parallel Computing
• Python
• Algorithm Design
• Neural Networks
• C
• Optimization
• C++
• Software Design
• C#
• Multithreading
• Object Oriented Design
• Text Mining
• Mindfulness
• Perl
• System Architecture
• Hadoop
• Search
• Scalability
• Software Engineering
• Agile Methodologies
• Management
• Computer Science
• Computer Vision
• Natural Language Processing
• Algorithms
• Data Mining
• High Performance Computing
• Image Processing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Information Retrieval
• Signal Processing
• Pattern Recognition
• Human Computer Interaction
• Distributed Systems
• Mapreduce
• Big Data
• Java
• Information Extraction
• Engineering Management