Yahoo! Researcher to Lecture at UW

September 16, 2011 — Yahoo! Chief Scientist for Search and Cloud Platforms Raghu Ramakrishnan will present a lecture about his research on September 21, at 3 p.m. in the College of Agriculture Auditorium. Raghu Ramakrishnan is a Yahoo! Fellow, heading the Web Information Management research group. The lecture is free and open to the public.

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).

His current research interests are in cloud computing, content optimization, and the development of a "web of concepts" that indexes all information on the web in semantically rich terms. 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 member of the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment. He was Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered crowd-sourcing, specifically question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq.

 

More News