Dr. Ben Shahshahani is currently the head of Search Sciences at Yahoo Labs, which focuses on the scientific areas of information retrieval, machine learning, data and text mining, and natural language processing in order to make near-term innovations in the Yahoo! search experience.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Ben was the Director of Natural Language Processing R&D at Nuance, the leader in speech recognition technology. Prior to Nuance, he was a researcher at IBM’s speech recognition group. Ben’s interests include data driven methods in natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning and online advertising. Ben holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.