Jay Yonamine

Product Manager, Geo

Google

Jay Yonamine is the head of data science and operations, for Google’s Global Patents organization. Recruited to a coveted chief data scientist positions at one of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies, Yonamine is at the forefront of using big data to make policy decisions and balancing human experience and data to achieve optimal results.

He has helped revolutionize the way Google has approached patent quality using the power of data science across its 60,000-plus patent portfolio. A few of Yonamine’s recent accomplishments at Google, where he supervises the patent data science team and a group of patent engineers, include leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence to build a patent claims breadth tool, a patent similarity tool, and a series of dashboards to track and enhance patent quality.

As part of customizing Google’s new intellectual property management system, Yonamine and his team executed a large-scale automated cleanup of all the company’s patent data, resulting in corrections of over 200,000 records. Yonamine’s groundbreaking work was on display as a doctoral student at Penn State, where he used his social science methodology training to build accurate and nuanced forecasts of various outcomes-of-interest, ranging from civil war onset to equity market fluctuations. His research focused on international conflict, particularly what caused conflicts to start, escalate, and stop. Yonamine made methodological innovations and collected new kinds of data to arrive at more accurate and nuanced conclusions than previous researchers.

Yonamine volunteers at Penn State in the Liberal Arts mentor program, helping students explore career paths and develop realistic post-college plans. He also serves on the California Advisory Board for TechBridge Girls, a non-profit that provides STEM training to girls in low income public schools. He lives in San Francisco, California.