Born in Argentina, studied in Argentina and Canada, did research in signal processing, speech recognition, and language learning technologies at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute), founded a startup, and helped start other high-tech companies. Published over 20 technical papers and 6 patents. I brought my research, product, and entrepreneurial background to Yahoo! Labs in 2006. Currently, I am leading the search advertising optimization group at Yahoo! Labs where I get the chance to work with an amazing multidisciplinary global team. Our goal is to improve the long-term success of Yahoo!’s search advertising platform by providing value to all three participants: users, advertisers, and publishers. Here are some of the projects my group is actively working on: design of new auctions for search advertising, inclusion of hidden costs in search advertising auctions, modeling of user sessions to improve click prediction and ad selection, fast adaptation of machine learning models in real-time, bid generation for advanced matching, studies of advertiser behavior by using self-contained micromarkets, and an experimental real time MapReduce software platform.