ANTONIO GULLI ~ Curriculum Vitae

Antonio has a passion for establishing and managing global technological talent, for innovation and execution. His core expertise is in cloud computing, deep learning, and search engines.


Currently, Antonio is Google with the Cloud Office of the CTO, Zurich working on Search, Cloud Infra, Sovereignty and on Conversational AI. Previously, he served as Founding Member for the Office of the CTO in the EMEA. Earlier on, he served as Google Warsaw Site Director Leader growing the site to 450+ engineers fully focused on Cloud managing teams in GCE, Kubernetes, Serverless, Borg, and Console.


So far, Antonio has been lucky enough to gain professional experience in 5 countries in Europe and to manage teams in 6 countries in EMEA and the U.S. In Amsterdam, as Vice President for Elsevier, a leading scientific publisher. In London, as Principal Eng. for Bing Search, Microsoft. In Italy and U.K, as CTO, Europe for Ask.com. In Poland, the U.K, and Switzerland with Google.


Antonio has co-invented a number of technologies for search, smart energy, and AI with 11 patents issued (21 applied), and published several books on coding and machine learning also translated in Japanese and Chinese. Antonio speaks Spanish, English, Italian, and he is currently learning Polish and French. Antonio is a proud father of 2 boys, Lorenzo, 21, Leonardo, 16, and a little queen Aurora, 11 years.

Contacts: agulli@gmail.com, linkedin.com/in/searchguy

PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Google, Director, Office of the CTO, London – Zurich

2022 – Present: Office of the CTO, EMEA, Zurich

  • Cloud Infra & Sovereignty

  • Search & Conversational AI

Google, Director, Office of the CTO, London – U.K.

2019 – 2021: Office of the CTO, EMEA, London. Main activities:

Google, Site and Engineering Director, Warsaw – Poland

2016 – 2019: In charge of Google Cloud products team in Europe. Main activities:

  • Technical management of several teams working on GCE, Kubernetes, Serverless, Borg, and Console.

  • Warsaw Site Lead coordinated the growth of a cross-functional site to hundreds engineers in Cloud.

RELX, Elsevier division, Vice President, Amsterdam – Netherlands

2014 – 2016: Transformed the academic publishing with a modern data-driven approach. Main achievements:

  • Delivery of a new SOLR based search platform for ScienceDirect and Scopus

  • Delivery of a new Academic recommendation engine considered as “The Spotify of Academia”

  • Management of Newsflo, a company acquired for benchmarking entities on multiple media sources

  • Management of global teams located in Amsterdam, London, and New York

Microsoft, Bing.com division, Principal Development Manager, London – U.K.

2009 – 2014: Provided a compelling user experience competitive with Google. Notable results:

  • First world-wide scalable combination of ‘knowledge graph’ with suggestions as you type technologies taking “search suggestions, autocomplete, and semantic search to a whole new level”. Lead the integration into both Microsoft properties (Microsoft.com, Bing.com, Xbox.com, and Windows 7) and Facebook

  • Double digit increase of UK ads revenues with innovative machine learning technologies

  • Creation of a real-time clustering platform for processing an evolving stream of news

  • Golden Star Award for machine learning and AA interviewer recognition for hiring long term talents

  • Technical management of teams in London, Paris, and Wroclaw(PL) collaborating with India, China, U.S.

IAC, Ask.com division, CTO UK & Europe, London - U.K. & Pisa – Italy

2007 – 2009: Co-created a competitive international web search engine. Important accomplishments:

  • Run Ask.com global web search ranking including Web freshness, News, Blog, Video

  • Delivery of “Daily Beast”, a site winning the “Time, 50 Best Websites News & Info” recognition

  • Winner of IAC, Horizon Award for being a top performer above and beyond the expectation

  • Coordination of teams sitting in Italy, in London, and in New Jersey working with NYC, California and China

Ask.com, GM for European R&D Center, Pisa – Italy

2005 – 2007: Established the first Ask.com European research center for attracting talent. Selected outcomes:

  • Delivery of Ask.com Image Search engine, a website considered as “a worthy alternative to Google” by PC-World, and delivery of Ask.com news search engine

  • Winner of Ask.com, Emerging Leader Award

Tiscali.com, Ideare.com division, Pisa – Italy

1998 – 2003: Co-created one of the first search companies in Europe for organizing web information. Activities:

  • Creation of an index of 150M web pages in 13 countries with additional 40M images, 3M videos, 3M audio mp3, and thousands of Usenet groups served to almost all Italian ISPs

  • Sold the company to Tiscali, 2nd largest European ISP for 7M€ (used for sustaining the company’s growth)

Researcher, Pisa – Italy

1996 – 1998: Early research in web information retrieval, parallel computing and distributed systems. Main work:

  • Co-developed Arianna, 1st Italian search engine, and empowered Fireball.de, 1st German search engine.

Education

2006 – Ph.D in Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy

2005 – M.D. in Engineering, University of Pisa, Italy

1998 – M.D. in Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy

Languages

English: Bilingual proficiency ; Italian: Native proficiency; Spanish: Professional working proficiency; French: Elementary proficiency; Polish: Elementary proficiency

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Invited Keynotes & Events

2021 – Invited keynote Ethical AI, Venice, Italy

2020 – Invited keynote AI Summit, London, UK

2019 – Invited keynote Gartner symposium, Barcelona, Spain

2019 – Shortlisted for 2019's @digi_masters Awards for top-5 Excellence in Technology in EMEA, London

2019 – Invited keynote Machine Learning, Spotify, Stockholm, Sweden

2019 – Invited keynote to APAC CIO community, cioacademyasia.org, Edinburgh, Scotland

2018 – Invited professor - Ph.D. Course on Deep Learning, University of Pisa

2018 – Co-wrote the Industry wide Serverless white paper for CNCF, representing Google

2017 – Senior PC Member, WWW 2017 conference, Lyon

2016 – “WSDM Cup Challenge”, co-organised the event with Elsevier and Microsoft, S. Francisco

2013 – “Suggestion Technologies for Bing”, invited keynote ECIR, Yandex.com, Moscow

Corporate Blogs

2022 - A 6 Year Old's Journey in Filing A Patent, Google, London

2021 - Competing In Virtual Care Will Require Innovation Beyond Video Calls, Google, London

2021 – The Critical Role Of 5G In The Future Of Work, Google, London

2020 – Supply Chain Resiliency Begins In The Cloud, Google, London

2020 – “Talking ML and Cloud Transformation at AI-First Companies with @searchguy°, Google, London

2019 – °The Singapore students using Cloud for smarter recycling°, Google, London

2015 – “A career where intuition meets technology”, Elsevier, Amsterdam

2013 – “Bing Autosuggest Expands”, “A Deeper Look at Autosuggest”, Microsoft, London


Patents

– 1/ Systems and methods for providing recommendations for academic and research entities, #11,226,999, year 2018

– 2/ Intent-aware keyboard, #9,990,052, continuation, year 2018

– 3/ Population and/or animation of spatial visualization(s), #9,842,149, continuation, year 2017

– 4/ System and methods for monitoring and reducing the consumption of electricity with a network of smart sensors, #9,811,102, year 2017 (with my 3 kids. My daughter is apparently the youngest woman to be granted a patent).

– 5/ Intent-aware keyboard, #9,576,074, year 2017

– 6/ Intent-based presentation of search results, #9,536,001, year 2017

– 7/ System and Methods for Classifying Answers such as URLs, #9,239,282, year 2016

– 8/ Population and/or animation of spatial visualization, #9,009,159, year 2015

– 9/ Sampling internet user traffic to improve search results, #8,046,357, year 2011

– 10/ Similarity detection and clustering of images, #7,801,893, year 2010

– 11/ Method and system to present video content, #7,730,40, year 2010

– … and 11 additional patents pending have been filed on USPTO


Computer Science Books

– Deep learning with tensorflow 2 and keras, Pack, 2019, also in Korean and Chinese, 1100 academic citations, 91 times 4.5 stars Amazon

– TensorFlow 1.x Deep Learning Cookbook, Packt, 2017, also in Korean and Chinese

– Deep Learning with Keras, Packt, 2017. also in Chinese, 2018, Japanese, O’Reilly, Russian, 2018, and Korean, 2017

– .. and 10 additional books are available on Amazon


Research Activities and Selected Journals

– Research on Search, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Cloud computing. Impact factor (h-index: 25)

– 10+ conference and journal papers are available on Google


Personal Blog (http://codingplayground.blogspot.com/)

– “The best thing about code is, it’s simple, easy to implement anywhere else and all patterns in one place. I have never seen the simplicity of having all patterns in one place. I had been through Modern C++ programming and design patterns from Alexanderscu. You made easier than that”

– ”Man, I like this dude's style! Short and sweet explanations/references of the algorithms and then an implementation in gods own C++. Respek! And thanks for posting!”


Press Releases & User comments

– [Google Serverless] "This is a solid step forward in making it easier for developers to use Google’s innovative services", serverless.com

– [Elsevier Suggest] “Just pinned the Suggest tab. I use it more than any other tab.”, @kgoutsos , twitter

– “the Spotify of Academia! #discover #science”, @Jeroen_van_Baar , twitter

– [Microsoft PageZero] “Our favourite is Page Zero, which provides you likely answers to your search before loading full pages of results. This is great when you already know the gist of something, but can't find the words”, Refinery

– ”Bing searchbox now auto-suggests names as you type. Because many people share the same name, this means that it is now easier to tell Bing who exactly you are looking for before you even hit the return key”, Techcrunch

- “This is completely amazing. There's always room for accommodating better things. It just goes to show that you can't simply ignore Bing even if you totally revere Google.", crazyengineers

- “Bing Autosuggest Expands to Take on Instant Search, Knowledge Graph In One Fell Swoop .. has taken search suggestions, autocomplete, and semantic search to a whole new level”, SearchEngineWatch

– [Microsoft+Facebook Search] ”Making it more efficient to search from Facebook search bar will give users an incentive to use Facebook search rather than going to a separate search engine like Google”, insideFacebook

– ”Facebook is a partner with Google's biggest rival, Bing, to handle web searches.”, SEW

– [Tina Brown's DailyBeast] ”Five who are changing the face of the Internet”, Newsweek

– ”Time 2010, 50 Best Websites 2010”, Time

– [Ask.com] “Returned very accurate image results, and it has a well-designed – search results page. This is a worthy alternative to Google”, PC-World test