Andrei Broder

Andrei Broder

Andrei Zary Broder (Hebrew: אנדרי זרי ברודר) is a Distinguished Scientist at Google. Previously he was a Research Fellow and Vice President of Computational Advertising for Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo he worked for AltaVista as the vice president of research, and for IBM Research as a Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM's Institute for Search and Text Analysis.

Andrei Broder was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1953. His parents were medical doctors, his father a noted oncological surgeon. They emigrated to Israel in 1973, when Broder was in the second year of college in Romania, in the Electronics department at the Bucharest Polytechnic. He was accepted at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in the EE Department. Broder graduated frpm Technion in 1977,with a B.Sc. summa cum laude. He was then admitted to the PhD program at Stanford, where he initially planned to work in the systems area. His first adviser was Prof. John L. Hennessy. After receiving a "high pass" at the algorithms qual, reputedly hard, Prof. Donald Knuth, already a Turing Award and National Medal winner, offered him the rare opportunity to become his advisee. Broder finished his PhD under Don Knuth in 1984. He then joined the newly founded DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. At DEC SRC, Andrei was involved with AltaVista from the very beginning, helping it deal with duplicate documents and spam. When AltaVista split from Compaq that bought DEC, Andrei became its CTO and then Chief Scientist and VP of Research. In 2002, he joined IBM Researchin New York to build its enterprise search product. In 2005, he returned to Silicon Valley and the Web Industry, as a Yahoo Fellow and Vice President. There he put the bases of a new discipline, Computational advertising, the science of matching ads to users and contexts. At Yahoo, Broder also helped build Yahoo! Research into one of the leading research organization. In 2012, Broder joined Google as a Distinguished Scientist, where he witched focus to another aspect of the WWW experience, large-scale personalization.

Broder's research centers on the internet, and internet searching. He is credited with being one of the first people to develop a CAPTCHA, while working for AltaVista. He also invented the MinHash locality sensitive hashing scheme for quickly estimating the similarity between two sets, which was applied within AltaVista to find near-duplicate web documents, and he also developed the bow-tie model of the web graph

Broder earned his bachelor's degree (summa cum laude) from the Technion in Israel, and a master's degree and Ph.D. (1985) from Stanford University, where his advisor was Donald Knuth. He is a fellow of ACM and IEEE.

References

• Broder, Andrei (2006). "Interview: "Search without a Box"". Yahoo! Search Blog. Retrieved 2006-03-04.
• "Yahoo! Appoints Dr. Andrei Broder as Research Fellow". Yahoo! Press Release. 2005. Retrieved 2006-03-04.