ISU Computer Science Alumn Rajesh Parekh Promoted to Director of Data Mining and Research at Yahoo!

July 6, 2007

Dr. Rajesh Parekh, an alumnus of the Iowa State University Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory and the Department of Computer Science, has recently been promoted to the position of Director of Data Mining and Research at Yahoo! Inc. Dr. Parekh received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1998, specializing in machine learning and data mining, under the supervision of Professor Vasant Honavar. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the constructive learning algorithms for grammar induction and pattern classification, and included one of the first positive results in the literature on efficient learning of regular languages from labeled examples.

In his new position, Dr. Parekh will continue to work on applications of data mining and machine learning to solve challenging problems in user personalization, web-page real-estate optimization, and balancing user experience with ad monetization. Dr. Parekh joined the Data Mining Research group at Yahoo! in October 2004, where he was promoted to the position of Data Mining Engineering Manager in 2006. Prior to joining Yahoo, Dr. Parekh was a Senior Data Mining Research Engineer at Blue Martini Software and a Senior Research Associate in Data Mining at Allstate Research and Planning Center.

Dr. Parekh has published over 25 research papers in refereed conferences and journals. Dr. Parekh has received several professional awards and honors including the Yahoo! Data Wizard Award (2005), KDD Cup Honorable Mention (2001), Iowa State University Research Excellence Award (1998), John Vincent Atanasoff Graduate Award (1996), and Iowa State University Teaching Excellence Award (1993). The Iowa State University Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory and the Department of Computer Science are proud to count Rajesh Parekh among their alumni and wish him continued success in his career.