14 DAY TRIAL // In its battle for search, Yahoo announced the appointment of Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan to Head of Yahoo! Research. Raghavan will lead research efforts to address complex challenges in key areas for Yahoo, including search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization, and mobility. Raghavan will report to Chief Data Officer and Senior Vice President Dr. Usama Fayyad, and he will be based in Sunnyvale, Calif., effective immediately. Yahoo Research includes facilities in Berkeley, Pasadena and Sunnyvale.
Raghavan is currently editor-in-chief of the "Journal of the ACM," a prestigious peer-reviewed journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that provides coverage of the most significant work happening in computer science. Additionally, he is a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University, and has also taught at Yale. He has been inducted as a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
Prior to joining Yahoo, Raghavan was senior vice president and chief technology officer of Verity, a leading provider of enterprise search software that enables organizations to discover, analyze and process all of the digital information within their enterprises. Prior to Verity, he worked for 14 years in a variety of technical and managerial positions at IBM, including head of the Computer Science Principles (CSP) department at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
Raghavan is the author of a well known textbook on algorithms, titled "Randomized Algorithms," and has published over 100 papers in various fields including algorithms, optimization, Web search and databases. Raghavan also holds over a dozen patents, including several on link analysis for web search.
Raghavan holds a Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley and an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from IIT in Madras, India.