Prabhakar Raghavan

Head of Yahoo! Research

Prabhakar Raghavan has been the head of Yahoo! Research since 2005. His research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm design. He is a consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and 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.

Andrei Broder

Research Fellow & Vice President, Search & Computational Advertising

Andrei Broder is a Yahoo! Research Fellow and Vice President for Search Technologies & Computational Advertising.

Previously he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis in IBM Research. From 1999 until early 2002 he was Vice President for Research and Chief Scientist at the AltaVista Company. Before that he has been a senior member of the research staff at Compaq's Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. He was graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University under Don Knuth.

His main research interests are the design, analysis, and implementation of randomized algorithms and supporting data structures, in particular in the context of web-scale information retrieval and applications. Broder is co-winner of the Best Paper award at WWW6 (for his work on duplicate elimination of web pages) and at WWW9 (for his work on mapping the web). He has published more than seventy papers and was awarded twenty patents. He is an IEEE fellow and serves as chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing.

Ron Brachman

Vice President, Worldwide
Research Operations

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).

R. Preston McAfee

Research Fellow & Vice President, Microeconomics

Preston joined Yahoo! Research in 2007 as a Research Fellow and Vice President, Microeconomics. He is responsible for the microeconomics research group focusing primarily on pricing, game theory, strategy and mechanism design.


Prior to Yahoo! Research, Preston was the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics & Management, and also executive officer for the social sciences, at Caltech. He formerly was a chaired professor at the University of Texas.


Preston received his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Florida, and master of science in mathematics, and a Ph.D in economics from Purdue University. The author of many academic papers on auctions, McAfee was one of the designers of the Federal Communication Commission’s first auction of radio spectrum rights for cellular phones, and over $20 billion has been raised with this auction.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

VP of Yahoo! Research Europe and Latin America

Born in Chile, studied in Chile & Canada, previously full professor at Univ. of Chile and ICREA research professor at UPF in Barcelona. Co-author of Modern Information Retrieval (Addison-Wesley, 1999) among other books and publications. Member of the ACM, AMS, IEEE (Senior), SIAM and SCCC, as well as the Chilean Academy of Sciences.

Awards from American Organization States, Institute of Engineers of Chile, and COMPAQ. Main hobby: applied geography.

Raghu Ramakrishnan

Cheif Scientist, Audience; Vice President & Research Fellow

Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Audience, and Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he heads the Community Systems 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 Chair of ACM SIGMOD, on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, 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.

Rajeev Rastogi

Vice President &
Head of Yahoo! Labs Bangalore

Previously Rajeev was a Bell Labs Fellow and the founding Director of the Bell Labs Research Center in Bangalore, India. Rajeev worked at Bell Labs from 1993 until 2008. During the period, he led a number of research projects that were incorporated into Lucent products and services. These include the Datablitz main-memory database system, the Fellini multimedia storage server, and the NetInventory auto-discovery engine. His research interests include database systems, data mining, and network management. His most recent research has focused on the areas of network monitoring and security, network graph compression and analysis, and video content dissemination.

Rajeev is active in the fields of databases, data mining, and networking, and has served on the program committees of several conferences in these areas. He currently serves on the editorial board of the CACM, and has been an Associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering in the past. He has published over 125 papers, and filed over 70 patents of which 40 have been issued. Rajeev received his B. Tech degree from IIT Bombay, and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin.