1981 - B.Tech - Electrical Engineering Vice President for Strategic Technologies, @ Google, USA
Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President for Strategic Technologies,Google, USA (1981/BT/EE).
Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan obtained his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1981, his M.S. (ECE) from University of California – Santa Barbara in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California – Berkeley in 1986. He served as Senior VP and Head of Yahoo! Labs since 2005, and recently took up a position as Vice President for Strategic Technologies, Google.
Dr. Raghavan is one of the rare individuals who have excelled in academic research, technical leadership and corporate management and governance. In academic research, Dr. Raghavan is well known worldwide for his outstanding accomplishments in Computer Science, particularly in the context of randomized algorithms. As a technical leader, Dr. Raghavan led the theory group at IBM Almaden Research Laboratory, a veritable analytical powerhouse, into the 21st century and the internet era, with far-reaching results. He created and led the Clever research project, one of the two pioneering groups working concurrently in the emerging field of link analysis for web search.
Dr. Raghavan and his group achieved a number of widely-reported and cited breakthroughs in web structure and modeling. The Clever project laid the foundation for IBM’s Webfountain project which provided web mining services to many large enterprises. The huge impact of this work continues to be felt to this date in academia as well as industry. After joining Yahoo in 2005, Dr. Raghavan built up a strong center of scientific excellence in Yahoo! Labs. He established several Yahoo! research centers around the world. He has, at the same time, continued a program of research on multiple fronts. Most recently, he has been working on showing how in-depth user studies, such as eye-tracking and interviews, can be combined with large-scale click mining to quantifiably improve user experiences.
Dr. Raghavan has received several honors and awards. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. His other honors include: Honorary doctorate from University of Bologna, Italy; UC Berkeley Distinguished CS Alumnus Award, Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the ACM, and several best paper awards. He deeply cares about the research community, and devotes time to mentoring and encouraging young researchers.
In recognition of Dr. Raghavan’s research and leadership in the field of web mining, IIT Madras and its alumni are proud to confer on him this award.
