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.
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