Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates Leading Yahoo Labs in Chile & Spain
Yahoo is expanding its research operations into Europe and Latin America with the opening of new facilities in Spain and Chile.
Web retrieval and mining expert Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates will lead both centers in their focus on topics related to Web search and information extraction. He will report directly to Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research.
Baeza-Yates, a former Catalonian Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) researcher and Professor at UPF, will play a crucial role in helping to establish strong partnerships between Barcelona Media, CWR and Yahoo! as well as draw on the expertise of the vast technical talent throughout Europe and Latin America.
Baeza-Yates is an expert on information retrieval and one of the top scientists in this area. He earned a Bachelor and Masters Degree in both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Chile, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is also the co-author of Modern Information Retrieval, the most used textbook on search, as well as several other books.
“Yahoo! provides me with the opportunity to discover and build the new sciences of the next generation of the Internet and have an impact on more than 400 million users,” said Baeza-Yates. “Our partnerships with Barcelona Media and the Center for Web Research provide Yahoo! with the opportunity to tap into a wealth of expertise in exploring and discovering innovative techniques in various areas of Web research.”
Yahoo! Research’s Santiago office will be run in conjunction with the Center for Web Research (CWR), which was created by Baeza-Yates and funded by the Millennium Scientific Initiative of the Planning Ministry and hosted by the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Chile.
The partnership with the CWR presents a unique opportunity for top level researchers to join in a common project and collaborate on new and innovative ideas with faculty and students. This unit will join other advanced research centers already present at the University, becoming part of a very attractive and diverse setting for innovation in Chile.
Yahoo! Research’s Barcelona office will be run in conjunction with the Center for Innovation Barcelona Media, a non-profit institution with local industry and Catalan government support, which has ties to Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and other local universities.
This first Yahoo! Research location in Europe will serve as the company’s magnet for the best European talent in key research areas. It also provides Yahoo! with the capability to tap into innovative ideas and research from students and faculty at many of the local universities in Barcelona and other major cities. The center’s new facility will be at the Parc Barcelona Media, the new reference point for media industry research and academia in the 22@ district in downtown Barcelona.
