Dr. Jianchang (JC) Mao is currently the head of Advertising Sciences in Y! Labs, responsible for the R&D of Sponsored Search, Contextual Advertising, Display Advertising, Targeting, and Categorization technologies and products.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Dr. Mao was Director of Emerging Technologies & Principal Architect at Verity Inc., a leader in Enterprise Search (acquired by Autonomy), from 2000 to 2004. Prior to this, Dr. Mao was a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center from 1994 to 2000. Dr. Mao's research interest includes Machine Learning, Data Mining, Information Retrieval, Online Advertising, Social Networks, Pattern Recognition and Image Processing. He received an Honorable Mention Award in ACM KDD Cup 2002, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award in 1996, and Honorable Mention Award from the International Pattern Recognition Society in 1993. Dr. Mao served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 1999-2000. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 1994.