Yannis Assael

International media

06/04/2026. Greece wants an EU crackdown on deepfakes, Politico Morning Tech.
06/08/2025. AI Is Helping Historians With Their Latin, Wall Street Journal.
28/07/2025. AI helps historians decipher ancient Roman texts, Associated Press News.
23/07/2025. Aeneas transforms how historians connect the past, Google DeepMind Blog.
23/07/2025. News at 10, BBC.
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 Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind specialising in Artificial Intelligence, and is featured in “MIT's Innovators Under 35” and “Forbes' 30 Under 30” lists of distinguished scientists in Europe. Additionally, he serves as a member of the National Council for Research, Technology and Innovation of Greece, a Special Advisor on AI for the Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance, and is the Greek delegate to the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence of the OECD. 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, foundational model evaluations and post-training, 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.

Experience

Google DeepMind

2017 – present deepmind.google
  • Senior Staff Research Scientist (2026 – )
  • Staff Research Scientist (2022 – 2026)
  • Senior Research Scientist (2018 – 2022)
  • Research Scientist (2017 – 2018)

LipNet Artificial Intelligence Inc

2017 lipnet.ai
  • CEO/Founder, audio-visual speech recognition

AccuInstruments

2015 – 2020 accuinstruments.com
  • Director/Founder, Machine Learning to improve accuracy and performance of scientific measurement instruments. (Deep Blue Labs Ltd.)

Legend 3D

2016 legend3d.com
  • Machine learning for video annotation and 2D to 3D movie conversion

Ocado

2014 ocado.com
  • Cybersecurity consulting

Tessera Multimedia

2013 – 2014 tessera.gr
  • Lead Developer on finite elements design and analysis for simulating heat conduction of fluids and solids

PinApps.com Mobile Applications Development

2011 – 2013 pinapps.com
  • Senior Mobile Application Developer

Freelance Developer

2007 – 2017 assael.gr
  • Undertaking a wide-range of freelance projects

Strategy & Advisory

National Council for Research, Technology and Innovation, Greece

2025 – present esetek.gov.gr
  • Member

Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (OECD)

2023 – present gpai.ai
  • National Delegate for Greece and Steering Group member

Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance and Artificial Intelligence

2023 – present mindigital.gr
  • Special Advisor on Artificial Intelligence

Hellenic Special Secretariat of Foresight

2023 – 2024 foresight.gov.gr
  • Member of the Innovation and Education & Research working groups of the National AI Strategy Committee

Anatolia College

2021 – present anatolia.edu.gr
  • Member of the Board of Trustees

Certifications

Certified Scrum Master (CSM®)

Scrum Alliance, 2021.

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

Distinguished Member, State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) Scholars

2026 State Scholarships Foundation (IKY)

MIT Innovators Under 35 Europe

2023 MIT Technology Review

Featured on the cover of Nature journal

2022 Nature Publishing Group

Featured in top scholars of the Hellenic State Scholarships Foundation

2022 Event for the 70-year anniversary

Best paper award

2022 Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery - Global Open

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. [link]
Google Scholar

Publications

1.Taylor Applebaum, Žiga Avsec, Yannis Assael, Souradeep Basu, David Belanger, Ottavia Bertolli, Lara Román Castellanos, Jun Cheng, Alexey Cherepanov, Winnie Chow, Lucy Colwell, Doug Fritz, Andreea Gane, Adam Gayoso, Alexander Karollus, Serhii Kashubin, Pushmeet Kohli, Oleg Kovalevskiy, David La, Natasha Latysheva, Michael V. LeVine, Victor Martin, Tanya Marwah, Sebastian Nowozin, Michael O’Neill, Joshua Pan, Filip Radlinski, John Reid, Luca Schulz, Sukhdeep Singh, Jamie Smith, Artem Sobolev, Kyle Taylor, Fei Tian, Ashok Thillaisundaram, Zoi Tsangalidou, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Niels uit de Bos, Jue Wang, Tom Ward, Wei-Hung Weng, Lindsay Willmore, Zachary Wu, Yunhan Xu, Augustin Žídek. Science skills for Antigravity: towards efficient and reliable scientific workflows, Tech Report, Google DeepMind, 2026.
2.Abhinit Modi, Aditya Srikanth Veerubhotla, Aliya Rysbek, Andrea Huber, Ankit Anand, Avishkar Bhoopchand, Brett Wiltshire, Daniel Gillick, Daniel Kasenberg, Eleni Sgouritsa, Gal Elidan, Hengrui Liu, Holger Winnemoeller, Irina Jurenka, James Cohan, Jennifer She, Julia Wilkowski, Kaiz Alarakyia, Kevin R. McKee, Komal Singh, Lisa Wang, Markus Kunesch, Miruna Pîslar, Niv Efron, Parsa Mahmoudieh, Pierre-Alexandre Kamienny, Sara Wiltberger, Shakir Mohamed, Shashank Agarwal, Shubham Milind Phal, Sun Jae Lee, Theofilos Strinopoulos, Wei-Jen Ko, Yael Gold-Zamir, Yael Haramaty, Yannis Assael. Evaluating Gemini in an arena for learning, arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.24477, 2025.
3.Google Gemini Team. Gemini 2.5: Pushing the frontier with advanced reasoning, multimodality, long context, and next generation agentic capabilities, arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.06261, 2025.
4.Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, Alison Cooley, Brendan Shillingford, John Pavlopoulos, Priyanka Suresh, Bailey Herms, Justin Grayston, Benjamin Maynard, Nicholas Dietrich, Robbe Wulgaert, Jonathan Prag, Alex Mullen, Shakir Mohamed. Contextualizing ancient texts with generative neural networks, Nature, 645, 8079, 141-147, Nature Publishing Group, 2025.
5.Google LearnLM Team, Abhinit Modi, Aditya Srikanth Veerubhotla, Aliya Rysbek, Andrea Huber, Brett Wiltshire, Brian Veprek, Daniel Gillick, Daniel Kasenberg, Derek Ahmed, Irina Jurenka, James Cohan, Jennifer She, Julia Wilkowski, Kaiz Alarakyia, Kevin McKee, Lisa Wang, Markus Kunesch, Mike Schaekermann, Miruna Pîslar, Nikhil Joshi, Parsa Mahmoudieh, Paul Jhun, Sara Wiltberger, Shakir Mohamed, Shashank Agarwal, Shubham Milind Phal, Sun Jae Lee, Theofilos Strinopoulos, Wei-Jen Ko, Amy Wang, Ankit Anand, Avishkar Bhoopchand, Dan Wild, Divya Pandya, Filip Bar, Garth Graham, Holger Winnemoeller, Mahvish Nagda, Prateek Kolhar, Renee Schneider, Shaojian Zhu, Stephanie Chan, Steve Yadlowsky, Viknesh Sounderajah, Yannis Assael. LearnLM: Improving Gemini for learning, arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.16429, 2024.
6.Google Gemini Team. Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context, arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05530, 2024.
7.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.
8.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.
9.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.
10.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.
11.Brendan Shillingford, Yannis Assael, Misha Denil, . Interactive decoding of words from visual speech recognition models, arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.00692, 2021.
12.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.
13.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.
14.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.
15.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.
16.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.
17.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.
18.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.
19.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.
20.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.
21.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.
22.Yannis M Assael, Brendan Shillingford, Shimon Whiteson, Nando de Freitas, . LipNet: End-to-End Sentence-level Lipreading, GPU Technology Conference, 2017, 2016.
23.Hossam Mossalam, Yannis M Assael, Diederik M Roijers, Shimon Whiteson, . Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning, NIPS Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop, 2016.
24.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.
25.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.
26.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.
27.John-Alexander M. Assael, Marc Peter Deisenroth, . From Pixels to Torques: Policy Learning using Deep Dynamical Convolutional Networks, Imperial College London, 2015.
28.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.
29.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.
30.John-Alexander M. Assael, Ziyu Wang, Bobak Shahriari, Nando de Freitas, . Heteroscedastic Treed Bayesian Optimisation, NIPS Workshop on Bayesian Optimization, 2014.
31.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.
32.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.
33.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.
34.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.
35.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. Visual speech recognition by phoneme prediction, WO Patent 219968A1, 2019.
2.Brendan Shillingford, Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Joao Ferdinando Gomes de Freitas. Cross-modal sequence distillation, US Patent 0160843A1, 2022.
3.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Brendan Shillingford. Training video data generation neural networks using video frame embeddings, WO Patent 053523A1, 2022.
4.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 11,355,097, 2022.
5.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Brendan Shillingford, Misha Denil. Interactive decoding of words from phoneme score distributions, US Patent App. 18/285,345, 2024.
6.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Thomas Chadwick Walters, Archit Gupta, Brendan Shillingford. Bandwidth extension of incoming data using neural networks, US Patent App. 18/780,377, 2025.
7.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Brendan Shillingford, Joao Ferdinando Gomes de Freitas. Adaptive visual speech recognition, US Patent App. 18/986,673, 2025.
8.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Brendan Shillingford. Enhancing images from a mobile device to give a professional camera effect, US Patent App. 18/852,940, 2025.
9.Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Brendan Shillingford. Variable resolution variable frame rate video coding using neural networks, US Patent App. 18/864,656, 2025.
10.Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Ioannis Alexandros Assael. Resolving time-delays using generative models, US Patent 12,561,108, 2026.

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.