Prabhakar Raghavan is a Senior Vice President at Google and Head of Google Search & Assistant. Prabhakar supervises Google’s Advertising and Commerce merchandises, including search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. Furthermore, he is responsible for infrastructure teams that provide much of the software backbone for search, ads, and other groups. Earlier, he worked as Vice President of Google Apps, Google Cloud, overseeing engineering, products and user experience. He will be reporting to the Google CEO Alphabet Sundar Pichai.
Wiki/Biography
Prabhakar Raghavan was born in 1960 (age 60 years; as in 2019) in Chennai, India. His mother, Amba Raghavan was a Physics teacher at Presidency College, Chennai. After attaining a BTech degree from IIT Madras, Prabhakar moved to the USA where he completed a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prabhakar submitted his doctoral thesis on Randomized Rounding and Discrete Ham-Sandwich Theorems: Provably Good Algorithms for Routing and Packing Problems (Integer Programming), in 1987.
Physical Appearance
Height (approx.): 6′
Eye Colour: Black
Hair Colour: White
Career
Prior to joining Google, Prabhakar served at Verity as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Thereafter, he worked at IBM and held various technical and managerial positions over the course of 14 years, with a focus on algorithms, data mining, and machine learning. In 2005, he joined Yahoo where he founded and led Yahoo’s scientific research lab before switching to Google in 2012.
Publications
He is the co-author of two extensively-used graduate writings on algorithms and search; Randomized Algorithms (1995) and Introduction to Information Retrieval (2008), apart from that, he has penned lecture notes comprising Algorithms and Computation: 4th International Symposium, ISAAC ’93, Hong Kong, December 1993. He has served as editor-in-chief for the Journal of the ACM, a scientific journal covering computer science in common, primarily theoretical aspects. He has published over 100 writings in multiple fields and owns 20 issued patents, including many on link analysis for web search.
Awards & Honors
- Best Paper Award at the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW9)
- Distinguished Alumnus Award, UC Berkeley Division of Computer Science (2006)
- Laurea Honoris Causa from the University of Bologna (2009)
- Distinguished Alumnus Award, IIT Madras (2012)
Apart from these, there are many other awards and honours to his name.
