Bradley Horowitz
Bradley Joseph Horowitz | |
|---|---|
| Born | Dearborn, Michigan, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan (B.S. in Computer Science, 1989); MIT Media Lab (M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences, 1991) |
| Occupation(s) | Business leader, technology executive |
| Years active | 1990s–present |
| Known for | Vice president at Google; co-founder of Virage, Inc. |
Bradley Joseph Horowitz is an American business leader and technology executive, recognized for his position as a vice president at Google.
Early life and education
Originally from Dearborn, Michigan, Horowitz obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1989. He continued his academic journey at the MIT Media Lab, joining the Vision and Modeling Group under the guidance of Professor Sandy Pentland. There, he earned a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences in 1991. Horowitz departed from the PhD program in 1993 to co-establish Virage. His scholarly focus encompassed computer vision, image processing, and computer graphics, leading to numerous research papers and more than a dozen patents.
Career
In 2004, Horowitz became part of Yahoo as Director of Media Search, where he launched the internal Hack Yahoo initiative featuring "Hack Days," which later expanded into public Open Hack Days. Rising to Vice President of Advanced Development, he oversaw teams responsible for founding Yahoo! Research Berkeley and the Brickhouse incubator. He played a pivotal role in facilitating significant "Web 2.0" acquisitions including Flickr, MyBlogLog, and Jumpcut.
Horowitz transitioned to Google in 2008 as vice president of product for consumer applications. His leadership extended over product teams managing Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Google Talk, Google Voice, Picasa, Orkut, and Blogger. In 2011, together with Vic Gundotra, he co-initiated and directed the development of the Google+ Project. By March 2015, Horowitz was heading the Google Photos and Streams product divisions.
He also contributes as a member of the Visiting Committee at the MIT Media Lab.
Entrepreneurship
As CTO and co-founder alongside Jeff Bach, Chiao-fe Shu, and Ramesh Jain, Horowitz helped establish Virage, Inc., a company specializing in extracting metadata from video content to enable semantic indexing. Virage went public on the NASDAQ in 2000 and was acquired by Autonomy in 2003. Throughout his time there, Horowitz obtained several patents related to media analysis and indexing technologies.
Personal life
Horowitz is married to Irene Au, a designer who has held senior executive roles at Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and Udacity. She currently serves as a design partner at Khosla Ventures.