Dr. Slav Petrov

Slav Petrov is a Distinguished Scientist / Senior Research Director at Google leading a globally distributed team that conducts natural language understanding and machine learning research. His work has been recognized with multiple Best Paper Awards (ACL’11, NAACL’12, ACL’16) and provides better language understanding to billions of users in a variety of Google products spanning Web Search, Assistant, Ads, Translate & Chrome. Slav is the recipient of the 2014 John Atanasoff Award by the President of Bulgaria and a World Champion at RoboCup 2004. For many years, Slav taught Statistical Natural Language Processing at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Petrov has spent roughly equal parts of his life in Bulgaria, Germany and the US. Whenever Bulgaria plays Germany in soccer, he supports Bulgaria.