Nest, Alphabet’s home automation subsidiary, is today regaining one of its previously lost executives. Google X co-founder Yoky Matsuoka is making a return to the realms of the technology giant after a cohort of different roles at various organizations. She’s departing from Apple to rejoin Nest, however, this time as the Chief Technology Officer.
This development was initially reported by Bloomberg. Matsuoka, for those unaware, is a robotics professor who is in demand at every tech behemoth in the Silicon Valley. She had been poached by Apple in May last year to help further better their health technology initiatives. She didn’t stick around for long and departed the company towards the end of last year.
At Apple, she was appointed as the lead for development of Cupertino’s HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit solutions. They are focused on tracking a person’s health, managing medical services and providing a platform to conduct medical studies. She was responsible for building other related machine learning algorithms as well.
Matsuoka reported to Apple’s COO Jeff Williams, who held responsibility for the Apple Watch, health research, and fitness applications. It is highly probable that most of the health or fitness features integrated into Apple products were suggested (or developed) under her guidance.
Prior to joining Apple in mid-2016 and departing from Nest back in 2015, she was struck down with a life-threatening disease. Due to it, she had to pass on the opportunity of gaining a VP role at Twitter. But after getting back on her feet, she was appointed as the CEO of health-data startup Quanttus. She then quit her chief executive role to join Apple in May 2016. And now she’s back at Nest.
She has been tasked with looking after the technological development of the thermostat, cameras and other home automation products. It is only her position which has changed from VP of Technology to CTO, the responsibilities she’s tasked with still remain pretty much the same. We can, thus, expect to see some new innovative products and features being added to Nest’s smart home products.
