Ben Shahshahani

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT BEN SHAHSHAHANI

Currently: SVP, Science & Machine Learning-Previously: VP, Head of Yahoo Research at Verizon Media-Previously: Engineering Director in Google\'s Display Advertising team-Before that: VP and head of Search & Media Science at Yahoo! Labs. My team is responsible for development of algorithms that power Yahoo\'s search and media products including relevance ranking for vertical search, search assist, page optimization, query and content processing, data mining and recommendation systems.Prior to that I was the head of the Sponsored Search Sciences group. In this role, I led multiple teams of researchers and engineers responsible for analysis and development of matching, modeling and optimization technologies for Yahoo\'s sponsored search advertising platform. Prior to this role, I manged the teams responsible for matching and predictive modeling in contextual and sponsored search advertising. I started my career at IBM as a researcher in speech recognition technology. In 1995 I joined Nuance, the leading provider of speech and natural language technology, as the twelfth employee and a founding member of the R&D group. At Nuance, I founded and managed the Natural Language Processing R&D group that developed Nuance\'s statistical language modeling & understanding, and call routing technologies which led to multiple high profile deployments including speech enabled customer service applications at AT & T, Bell Canada and Sprint. I was responsible for the performance and accuracy of several award winning voice enabled applications including the first large scale stock name recognizer which has been deployed at major financial institutions such as Schwab and Fidelity. I also led a number of research and development projects in automatic directory assistance, acoustic modeling, feature extraction, search, language modeling and NLU.I received the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue.Specialties: Executive management of applied research and development organizations.Expertise in online advertising, search, information retrieval, machine learning, statistical modeling, natural language processing, speech recognition and dialog systems.