Yahoo! Labs

Prabhakar Raghavan

Head, Yahoo! Labs

Prabhakar Raghavan is the head of Yahoo! Labs. Raghavan's research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm design. He is a consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and formerly editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM. He has co-authored two textbooks, on randomized algorithms and on information retrieval. Raghavan received his PhD from Berkeley and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, he was the chief technology officer at Verity and has held a number of technical and managerial positions at IBM Research.

Ron Brachman

Vice President, Yahoo! Labs and Research Operations; Head, Yahoo! Academic Relations

Ron Brachman is Vice President of Worldwide Research Operations for Yahoo! Research. He is responsible for all operational activities that support Yahoo! Research, including budget, Research/business unit relationships, IP, academic outreach, website operations, and the Research Engineering function. He is also now engaged in the creation and leadership of a corporate-wide Academic Relations unit. Ron joined Yahoo! in 2005. He was one of the original leaders who helped to define and build Yahoo! Research.

He founded the lab in New York City and established the basic operational procedures for the entire research organization, acting as its main liaison to key corporate support functions.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Ron was the Director of the Information Processing Technology Office at DARPA; before that he held various research leadership and management positions at AT&T, both at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs.

Ron holds a B.S.E.E. degree from Princeton University (summa cum laude) as well as the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Jianchang (JC) Mao

Head, Advertising Sciences

Dr. Jianchang (JC) Mao is currently the head of Advertising Sciences in Y! Labs, responsible for the R&D of Sponsored Search, Contextual Advertising, Display Advertising, Targeting, and Categorization technologies and products.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Dr. Mao was Director of Emerging Technologies & Principal Architect at Verity Inc., a leader in Enterprise Search (acquired by Autonomy), from 2000 to 2004. Prior to this, Dr. Mao was a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center from 1994 to 2000. Dr. Mao's research interest includes Machine Learning, Data Mining, Information Retrieval, Online Advertising, Social Networks, Pattern Recognition and Image Processing. He received an Honorable Mention Award in ACM KDD Cup 2002, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award in 1996, and Honorable Mention Award from the International Pattern Recognition Society in 1993. Dr. Mao served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 1999-2000. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 1994.

Raghu Ramakrishnan

Chief Scientist, Audience & Cloud Computing; Fellow and Vice President

Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Audience & Cloud Computing, and a Fellow at Yahoo!, where he heads the Web Information Management group. He has been Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq. His research is in the area of database systems, with a focus on data mining, online communities, and web-scale data management. He has developed scalable algorithms for clustering, decision-tree construction, and itemset counting, and was among the first to investigate mining of continuously evolving, stream data. His work on query optimization and deductive databases has found its way into commercial database systems, and his work on extending SQL to deal with queries over sequences has influenced the design of window functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm received the SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time award, and he has written the widely-used text "Database Management Systems" (WCB / McGraw-Hill, with J. Gehrke), now in its third edition.

He is on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, was Chair of ACM SIGMOD, and has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and the Database area editor of the Journal of Logic Programming.

Raghu is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and has received several awards, including a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and an ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.

Ben Shahshahani

Head, Search Sciences

Dr. Ben Shahshahani is currently the head of Search Sciences at Yahoo Labs, which focuses on the scientific areas of information retrieval, machine learning, data and text mining, and natural language processing in order to make near-term innovations in the Yahoo! search experience.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Ben was the Director of Natural Language Processing R&D at Nuance, the leader in speech recognition technology. Prior to Nuance, he was a researcher at IBM’s speech recognition group. Ben’s interests include data driven methods in natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning and online advertising. Ben holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.