American computer scientist
Prabhakar Raghavan is a senior vice president at Google, where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products.[2] His research spans algorithms, web search and databases[3] and he is the co-author of the textbooks Randomized Algorithms[4] with Rajeev Motwani[5] and Introduction to Information Retrieval.[6][7][8][9][10]
Early life and education
Prabhakar's mother, Amba Raghavan, taught physics and math at St Joseph's Convent School, Bhopal and St Patricks High School, Adyar, Chennai after earning a master's degree from Presidency College, Chennai.[11]
Prabhakar himself holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.[3] He did his schooling from Campion School, Bhopal.
Career
Prior to joining Google, he worked at Yahoo! Labs. Before that, Prabhakar worked at IBM Research[12] and later became senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity.
Awards and honors
Prabhakar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).[13] From 2003 to 2009, Prabhakar was the editor-in-chief of Journal of the ACM.[14]
In 1986, Prabhakar received the Machtey Award for Best Student Paper. In 2000, he was named a fellow of the IEEE;[15] received the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems;[16] and received the Best Paper Award at the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW9).[17] In 2002, Prabhakar was named a fellow of the ACM.[18] He received the 2006 Distinguished Alumnus Award, UC Berkeley Division of Computer Science.[19] In 2008, Prabhakar was made a member of the National Academy of Engineering,[20] and in 2009, he was awarded a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna. In 2012, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the IIT Madras. In 2017, Prabhakar and co-authors received the Seoul test of time award for their 2000 paper “Graph Structure in the Web” at the WWW conference.[21]
