Time: Thursday, May 10, 2007 (10:30am-11:15am)
Location: Theatre
Speaker: Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo! Inc.)
Title: The Changing Face of Web Search
Abstract:
The Web is entering its second decade. We started with organizing it as a directory and implementing automation and standard information retrieval techniques. During this phase, we also recognized the crucial role the topology and link structure of the Web itself plays in improving relevancy. This brings us to the modern era of Web search, where we need to tackle a new set of challenges including improving comprehensiveness, relevancy, freshness, user-experience, and more.
The talk will discuss this new state of the Web, the challenges it presents, and focus on the opportunities ahead in social media.
Biographical Information:
Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Yahoo!'s Advanced Development Division, leads Yahoo!'s efforts in building innovative products and technologies across the company. Horowitz is driving innovation and leveraging Yahoo!'s platform to deliver compelling Yahoo! products and services to a community of 500 million users. In addition, he is responsible for the company's initiative to open up its platform which includes overseeing the Yahoo! Developer Network (Y!DN). Previously, he managed a portfolio of products for Yahoo! including media search, desktop search, and the Yahoo! Toolbar.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Horowitz served as both the chief technical officer and the vice president of engineering for the Virage division of Autonomy, where he was responsible for the technical delivery of five major product lines. Prior to Autonomy, he founded Virage, the company widely recognized as the market creator and leader for advanced media indexing and analysis. Horowitz helped grow the company from "a garage startup" through its NASDAQ IPO.
Horowitz was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. While at the Media Lab, he worked on a number of topics related to computer vision, graphics and image processing, which resulted in a patented new technique for the recovery of structure, motion and camera parameters from video sequences.
Horowitz holds an MS in Media Science from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
