Raghu Ramakrishnan, Chief Scientist, Audience and Cloud Computing, Yahoo!
Abstract:
I will present an overview of many large-scale data challenges at Yahoo!, and the approaches we are taking to solving them. I will begin by considering some of the driving applications, including Yahoo!’s many portals, web search, and social networking. I will then discuss some of the technology that underpins these applications, including content optimization and targeting, information extraction, and cloud computing infrastructure for data analysis, warehousing and serving.
Bio:
Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Audience and Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, and is a Yahoo! Fellow, heading the Web Information Management research group. His work in database systems, with a focus on data mining, query optimization, and web-scale data management, has influenced query optimization in commercial database systems and 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” (with Johannes Gehrke). Ramakrishnan has received several awards, including the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE.
Ramakrishnan is on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD, and is a past Chair of ACM SIGMOD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment. He was Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, nd 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.