Welcome to Rajesh Parekh's homepage

Biography

My passion is leveraging large scale data analysis to identify strategic data insights and solve challenging business problems. I am interested in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Applied Machine Learning, Computational Advertising, Web Mining, Social Network Analysis, Neural Networks, and Grammatical Inference.

After 6-1/2 great years at Yahoo! I started an exciting new career. I am the Director of Research at Groupon (based in their Palo Alto location) and am focusing on a variety of interesting problems in user understanding, personalization, and optimization.

Previously at Yahoo! I had an incredible opportunity to make significant contributions to increasing ad revenue and improving user experience. I was the Senior Director of Research at Yahoo! Labs where I led a talented team of scientists and research engineers focusing on display ad targeting. My team was responsible for the science behind Yahoo!'s flagship behavioral targeting system. My research also focused on all aspects of user behavior understanding, new display ad targeting models such as adaptive targeting and social targeting and categorization.

Prior to Yahoo!, I worked with the Data Mining team at Blue Martini Software where I was involved in buidling business intelligence and customer relationship management solutions for the retail e-commerce space. Before Blue Martini, I was at the Allstate Research Center applying data mining to insurance problems such as cross-sell, retention, and fraud.

I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Iowa State University in 1998. My dissertation research focussed on constructive learning of neural networks and induction of regular grammars. I worked on an NSF funded project on constructive neural network learning.

I am the co-chair for the new Industry Practice Expo track at the KDD 2011 conference. I have co-authored over 25 research papers that have been published in peer reviewed journals and conferences. I have also filed over 15 international patent applications. I have won several awards and honors in my career. My team's conributions to behavioral targeting were recognized with the Display Advertising team award and the You Rock award in 2010. I was awarded the Yahoo! You Rock award in 2008 for my work on real-time prediction of news-worthy queries and the Yahoo! Data Wizard award in 2005 for my work on optimizing the number of sponsored search ads shown on the search results page. At Iowa State University I won a Research Excellence award for my Ph.D. dissertation research and a Teaching Excellence award for my efforts in the introductory computer science course - Computer Literacy and Applications.

	Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
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Other Information

Personal	Ph.D. Research	Publications	PDF