Yoav Shoham

Career

Shoham received a PhD from Yale in 1986 and was an AI professor in Stanford's Computer Science Department for 28 years, where Shoham is now professor emeritus. Shoham also served as a principal scientist at Google, according to AI21 Labs.¹⁵²

Alongside academic work, Shoham has founded several AI companies: TradingDynamics, later acquired by Ariba; Katango and Timeful, both acquired by Google; and AI21 Labs, where Shoham is chairman and co-founder. Stanford HAI lists Shoham on the steering committee of the AI Index, which tracks AI activity and progress, and Shoham's Stanford profile describes Shoham as chairing WeCode, a nonprofit initiative that trains programmers from disadvantaged populations.¹²⁵³

Research and teaching

Shoham's research spans artificial intelligence, game theory and multi-agent systems. With Kevin Leyton-Brown, Shoham wrote Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations (Cambridge University Press, 2009), an introduction to systems of autonomous agents with differing information and interests. Shoham has also taught game theory in an online course.²⁶¹

Shoham is a co-author of the 2022 MRKL Systems paper from AI21 Labs, which proposes a modular architecture that combines large language models with external knowledge sources and discrete reasoning, and the 2024 Jamba paper on a hybrid Transformer-Mamba language model.⁷⁴

Work and contributions

• Jamba Open weights

  Last author of Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model (2024), a hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts model; the paper says Jamba was released under the Apache 2.0 license on AI21 Labs' Hugging Face page.⁴

• AI Index Published research

  Listed as a member of the AI Index Steering Committee on Stanford HAI's People of AI Index page; Shoham's homepage also describes the index.³⁵

Timeline

1. 1986Received a PhD from Yale.¹
2. 2009Published Multiagent Systems with Kevin Leyton-Brown through Cambridge University Press.⁶
3. May 2022Co-authored the MRKL Systems paper on combining language models with external tools and reasoning.⁷
4. Mar 2024Last author of the Jamba hybrid Transformer-Mamba model paper from AI21 Labs.⁴

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Principal Scientist, Google²

Honors and recognition

• Fellow, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence · AAAI, 2002¹
• Autonomous Agents Research Award · ACM SIGART, 2008¹
• Influential Paper Award, AAMAS · International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2011¹
• ACM Fellow · Association for Computing Machinery, 2013¹
• AAAI/ACM Allen Newell Award · ACM and AAAI, 2013¹
• Feigenbaum Prize · AAAI, 2017¹
• Fellow, Game Theory Society · Game Theory Society, 2018¹
• IJCAI Research Excellence Award · International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 2019¹

Where they work

• AI21 Labs 1 person in the wiki
• Stanford University 40 people in the wiki

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