Yahoo! Labs Leadership
Yahoo! Labs is the scientific engine powering one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide.
From idea to product innovation, Yahoo! Labs is responsible for the algorithms behind the quality of the web experience for hundreds of millions of users. We impact one out of every two people online, and we do it from some of the most interesting, diverse, creative and inspiring locations on the planet. Our scientists collaborate with each other and with scientists outside Yahoo!, pioneering innovations that improve the Yahoo! experience in both evolutionary and revolutionary ways.
Yahoo! Labs scientists invent the technologies of the future, and then make them a reality today.
Ron Brachman
Chief Scientist and Head, Yahoo! Labs
Ron Brachman is Head of Yahoo! Labs. He is responsible for all operational activities that support Yahoo! Labs, including budget, IP, academic outreach, website operations, the Research Engineering function, and others. He also created and leads the company-wide Academic Relations unit. Ron joined Yahoo! in 2005. He was one of the original leaders who helped to define and build Yahoo! Research.
Ron founded our research lab in New York City and established the basic operational procedures for the entire Research and Labs organizations, 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, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He recently won IJCAI's Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award and AAAI's Distinguished Service Award. He served as President of AAAI from 2003 to 2005. He also edits the Synthesis Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning series of online publications for Morgan & Claypool.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
VP of Research for Europe & LatAM
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.
Ronny Lempel
Chief Data Scientist and Senior Director
Ronny Lempel joined Yahoo! Research in October 2007 to open and establish its lab in Haifa, Israel. Since joining Yahoo!, Ronny has led R&D activities in diverse areas, including Web Search, Page Optimization and Recommender Systems. In January 2013 Ronny was appointed Yahoo! Labs’ Chief Data Scientist.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Ronny spent 4.5 years at IBM's Haifa Research Lab with the Information Retrieval Group, where his duties included research and development in the area of enterprise search systems.
Ronny received his PhD, which focused on search engine technology, from the Faculty of Computer Science at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in early 2003. During his PhD studies, Ronny spent two summer internships at the AltaVista search engine.
Yoelle Maarek
Head, Yahoo! Labs Israel and Senior Research Director
Yoelle Maarek is the head of Yahoo! Labs in Israel and a Senior Director at Yahoo!. Her team conducts research activities impacting products such as Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Answers.
Prior to this, Yoelle was the Director of Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she opened in 2006 and grew to close to 40 staff members. There, she led the team in charge of "Suggest," Google's query completion feature deployed on google.com and YouTube worldwide.
From 1989 to 2006, Yoelle was with IBM Research, first in the US, and then in Israel, where she held a number of technical and management positions, eventually leading the search and collaboration department and becoming a Distinguished Engineer. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Technion, in Haifa, Israel, in 1989, during her PhD studies, she spent a year at Columbia University in New York as a visiting PhD student. She graduated from the "Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees" in Paris, France, and received her DEA (graduate degree) in Computer Science from Paris VI University, both in 1985. Yoelle's research interests include information retrieval, Web search, Web mining and Web applications. She has published over 65 articles in these fields and is active in the research community. She has served as regular or senior PC member at most recent SIGIR,WWW and WSDM conferences, as PC co-chair of WWW'2009, WSDM'2012 and SIGIR'2012. She is currently serving as Senior PC member for WWW'2013, SIGIR'2013 and ECIR'2013. Yoelle is a member of the Board of Governors of the Technion. She was appointed ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2010.
