Andrei Zary Broder | |
|---|---|
 Andrei Broder in 2010 | |
| Born | (1953-04-12)April 12, 1953 (age 72) |
| Alma mater | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology(B.Sc.) Stanford University(PhD) |
| Known for | Computational advertising, algorithms for WWW, shingling, min-hashing, CAPTCHA, web graph analysis |
| Awards | ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, National Academy of Engineering Member, ACM Paris Kanellakis Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science Computational advertising |
| Institutions | Google,Yahoo!,AltaVista,IBM Research |
| Thesis | Weighted random mappings; properties and applications (1985) |
| Doctoral advisor | Donald Knuth |
Andrei Zary Broder (born April 12, 1953) is a distinguished scientist atGoogle. Previously, he was aresearch fellow andvice president of computational advertising forYahoo!, and before that, the vice president of research forAltaVista. He has also worked forIBM Research as a distinguishedengineer and wasCTO of IBM's Institute for Search and Text Analysis.
Broder was born inBucharest, Romania, in 1953. His parents were medical doctors, his father a noted oncological surgeon. They emigrated toIsrael in 1973, when Broder was in the second year of college in Romania, in the Electronics department at thePolitehnica University of Bucharest.
He was accepted atTechnion – Israel Institute of Technology, in the EE Department. Broder graduated from 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 wasJohn L. Hennessy. After receiving a "high pass" at the reputedly hard algorithms qual,Donald Knuth, already a Turing Award and National Medal winner, offered him the opportunity to become his advisee. Broder finished his PhD under Knuth in 1985.[1] He then joined the newly foundedDEC Systems Research Center inPalo Alto. At DEC SRC, Andrei was involved withAltaVista from the very beginning, helping it deal with duplicate documents and spam. When AltaVista split fromCompaq that bought DEC, Andrei became its CTO and then chief scientist and VP of research.
In 2002, he joinedIBM Research in 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 buildYahoo! Research into one of the leading Web research organizations. Broder was elected a member of theNational Academy of Engineering in 2010 for his contributions to the science and engineering of the World Wide Web. In 2012, Broder joinedGoogle as a distinguished scientist, where he switched focus to another aspect of the WWW experience, large-scale personalization.[2]
In 1989, he discovered (independently fromDavid Aldous) an algorithm for generating auniform spanning tree of a given graph.[3]
Over the last fifteen years,[when?] Broder pioneered several algorithms systems and concepts fundamental to the science and technology of theWorld Wide Web. Some of the highlights include: In 1997, Broder led the development of the first practical solution for finding near-duplicate documents on web-scale using "shingling" to reduce the problem to a set-intersection problem and "min-hashing" or to construct "sketches" of sets. This was a pioneering effort in the area oflocality-sensitive hashing. In 1998, he co-invented the first practical test to prevent robots from masquerading as human and access web sites, often referred to asCAPTCHA.[4] In 2000, Broder, then at AltaVista, together with colleagues from IBM and DEC SRC, conducted the first large-scale analysis of the Web graph, and identified thebow-tie model of theweb graph.[5] Around 2001–2002, Broder published an opinion piece where he qualified the differences between classical information retrieval and Web search and introduced a now widely accepted classification of web queries into navigational, information, and transactional.[6]
He is a fellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery,National Academy of Engineering, and theIEEE. He was one of the recipients of the 2012 ACMParis Kanellakis Award for his work onw-shingling andmin-hashing,[7] and he won this award again in 2020, together withYossi Azar,Anna Karlin,Michael Mitzenmacher, andEli Upfal for their work on the power of two choices.
