Bradley Joseph Horowitz is an American entrepreneur and internet executive. He is a vice president at

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Early life and education

Horowitz was born in Dearborn,

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and t ...

. Horowitz received a bachelor of science in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

in 1989. He pursued his graduate studies at the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Media Lab, in the Vision and Modeling Group, under Professor Sandy Pentland. He received a master of science in Media Arts and Sciences in 1991, and subsequently entered the PhD program. He dropped out of the PhD program in 1993 to co-found Virage. Horowitz's academic work focused on the intersection of computer vision, image processing and computer graphics. He has published numerous refereed papers in academic journals, including work on recovery of non-rigid structure from motion and fractal image compression, and has been awarded more than a dozen patents.

Career

Horowitz joined

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

in 2004 as Director of Media Search. Eventually he began the internal Hack Yahoo program, most notable for "Hack Days." Hack Days eventually morphed into the public facing Open Hack Days, including

Beck Beck David Hansen (born Bek David Campbell; July 8, 1970) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with his experimental and lo-fi style, and became known for creating musical colla ...

's appearance at Yahoo's Sunnyvale campus in 2006. Eventually he was promoted to Vice President of Advanced Development, and his team created both Yahoo Research Berkeley and the Brickhouse incubator. Horowitz is also known for sponsoring numerous "Web 2.0" acquisitions into Yahoo, including

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

, MyBlogLog and Jumpcut. Horowitz left Yahoo and joined

in 2008 as vice president of product for consumer applications, eventually leading the product management organizations for Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Google Talk, Google Voice, Picasa, Orkut and Blogger. In 2011, Horowitz and Vic Gundotra conceived of and led the

Google+ Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google p ...

Project. In March 2015, he became the lead for the Google Photos and Streams products. Horowitz serves on the Visiting Committee of the MIT Media Lab.

Entrepreneurship

Horowitz was CTO and a co-founder (with Jeff Bach, Chiao-fe Shu and

Ramesh Jain Ramesh Chandra Jain (born 8 June 1949) is a scientist and entrepreneur in the field of information and computer science. He is a Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, Univers ...

) of Virage, Inc. Virage technology "watched, read and listened to raw video," extracting metadata that allowed for detailed semantic-based indexing of the video content. Virage went public on the

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

in 2000, and was acquired by

Autonomy In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy, from , ''autonomos'', from αὐτο- ''auto-'' "self" and νόμος ''nomos'', "law", hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one' ...

in 2003.Autonomy buys video software rival
CNET. Retrieved on 2020-06-26. Horowitz acquired half a dozen patents in the field of media analysis and indexing while at Virage.

Personal life

Horowitz is married to designer Irene Au, who has held executive roles with Netscape, Yahoo, Google and Udacity.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Horowitz, Bradley Google employees Living people MIT Media Lab people University of Michigan alumni Yahoo! employees 1965 births