Dr. Ashvin Kannan is currently a Director of Research at Yahoo Labs, responsible for the research, development and deployment of algorithms for the retrieval and ranking of sponsored search results (advertisements to be shown when a user does a search). Prior to joining Yahoo, Ashvin worked in different individual and management capacities in the R&D group at Nuance, working on speech recognition and natural language processing. Ashvin's interests include data driven methods in natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning and online advertising, to solve real-world problems. Ashvin holds a PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from Boston University and a B.E (Honors) in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIT-Roorkee.