BIOGRAPHIES

Neel Sundaresan
Sr. Director and Head - Research Labs, eBay
Neel Sundaresan is the Senior Director and Head of eBay Research Labs. His areas of work includes Social Networking Analysis and Applications including Community Computing as applied to Finding, Classification, Trust, Safety and Reputation, Incentive Systems, and other aspects of eCommerce. Prior to joining eBay , he was a founder and CTO of a startup focused on multi-attribute fuzzy search and network CRM. Prior to that, he was the head of the eMerging Internet Technologies group at the IBM Research Center . There he built the first XML-based Search Engine. He was one of the early leaders in building XML technologies including schema-aware compression algorithms, application component generators and pattern-match systems and compilers. He built the first RDF reference implementation as a W3C standard recommendation. He led research work in other areas like domain specific search engines, multi-modal interfaces and assistive technologies, semantic transcoding, web mining, query systems, and classification for semi-structured data. Prior to this he worked on C++ compiler and runtime systems for massively parallel machines and for shared memory systems and also on retargetable compilers, program translators and generators. He has over 40 research publications and several patents to his credit. He has a degree in mathematics and a masters in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai India and a PhD in computer science from Indiana University , Bloomington.

Kourosh Gharachorloo
Traffic Quality Team, Google
Prior to joining Google on December 2002, Kourosh was a Consulting Engineer and Principal Member of Technical Staff at the Western Research Laboratory (Hewlett-Packard, part of Compaq before May 2002, and Digital before June 1998). At WRL, he was involved in numerous research projects including Piranha (a highly integrated multiprocessor server with eight processor cores per chip), commercial database workload characterization, and Shasta (a software DSM system). In addition, he was a major contributor to the design and specification of Alpha processor and server platforms (both 21264- and 21364-based systems). He was also a contributor to the Alpha architecture specification, and authored a chapter of the Alpha Architecture Reference Manual.

Before joining Digital in 1992, Kourosh was a key contributor in the Stanford Dash and Flash multiprocessor projects. In addition, his thesis research on memory consistency models has influenced academic research and impacted the specifications and implementations of several commercial microprocessors

Kourosh has authored over 45 technical conference and journal papers, and has 26 filed patents. He has also taught several courses at Stanford, served as General Chair for ASPLOS 2002, and has served on various program committees and invited panels.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Research
Prabhakar Raghavan has been Head of Yahoo! Research since 2005. His research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm design. He is a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM. Raghavan received his PhD from Berkeley and is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE. Prior to joining Yahoo, he was Chief Technology Officer at  Verity; before that he held a number of technical and managerial positions at IBM Research.