Dr. Claudiu Musat leads Digital Ink research at Google DeepMind, where he directs a team developing foundation models that bridge handwriting understanding with broader AI capabilities in computer vision and natural language processing. His work impacts tens of millions of users globally and has led to multiple patents and publications. Previously, as Director of AI Research at Swisscom, he established novel academic collaboration models with leading institutions like EPFL and ETH, supervising over 50 master students and publishing 30+ papers in top conferences. Throughout his 20-year career spanning academia and industry, including postdoctoral research at EPFL’s AI Lab and the founding of an ML-driven startup, he has contributed significantly to fields ranging from sentiment analysis to recommendation systems, accumulating over 2000 citations. His research interests span multimodal learning, natural and multi-turn LLM interactions and user behavior modeling. His current focus includes fostering industry-academia collaboration, having recently pioneered a novel university partnership program.