Alumni: Prabhakar Raghavan

Prabhakar Raghavan

Prabhakar Raghavan is Vice President of Strategic Technologies at Google. Raghavan's research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm design. He is a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University and formerly editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM. He has co-authored two textbooks, on randomized algorithms and on information retrieval. Raghavan received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE; he has also been awarded a Laurea ad honorem by the University of Bologna. Prior to joining Google, he had held positions as the Head of Yahoo! Labs, the chief technology officer at Verity, and at IBM Research.

Work Experience

  • Vice President, Strategic Technologies, Google, present
  • Chief Strategy Officer, Executive Vice President, and Head of Yahoo! Labs, 2005-2012
  • Consulting Professor, Computer Science, Stanford University, 1995-present
  • Chief Technology Officer, Verity, 2000-2005
  • IBM Research, 1986-2000

Education

  • PhD, Computer Science, UC Berkeley
  • BTech, Electrical Engineering, IIT in Madras

Awards, Honors and Significant Achievements

  • Member, National Academy of Engineering
  • Fellow, ACM
  • Fellow, IEEE
  • Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the ACM
  • Over 100 papers in fields including algorithms, optimization, web search, and databases
  • Author of textbooks "Randomized Algorithms" (with R. Motwani, Cambridge University Press, 1995) and "Introduction to Information Retrieval" (with C.D. Manning and H. Schuetze, Cambridge University Press, 2008)