We’ve just heard from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and it’s my great pleasure to share that our very own Head of Yahoo! Research, Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, has been elected to join their esteemed body of members for his significant contributions to algorithms and the structure of the Web. This outstanding distinction is a first at Yahoo! (and I imagine, not the last) and is among the highest professional honors in the engineering community. This recognition places him amongst the engineers who have made the most impact, across the United States, on technology that has profound effects on society. One of the highest forms of acknowledgement an engineer could get at a national level.

Over the past couple of years, Prabhakar has led and helped build our Yahoo! Research organization to examine some of the most complex problems facing the Internet. His extensive expertise in search algorithms (he literally wrote the book on it), understanding the fundamental structure of the Web, and the social phenomena emerging from it, continues to play an important role as we work to make Yahoo! the starting point on the Web. Yahoo! Research is charged with a simple but fundamentally powerful vision: “Invent the new sciences underlying the Internet and the new ineteractive media.”

Nothing is more inspiring to me than a collection of brilliant minds. Over the past four years, our research team has grown from one small lab into a world-class research organization with seven locations in four countries (and we’re not stopping there). Under Prabhakar’s leadership, Yahoo! Research is focused on creating and exploring groundbreaking technologies that will improve our users’ online experience, from understanding communities and the new economics of the Web to the new emerging science of computational advertising, and economics and social systems to advanced search technologies.

Thanks for making us proud, Prabhakar.

Usama Fayyad
Chief Data Officer & EVP of Research & Strategic Data Solutions

Photo from sigir2007.