Prabhakar Raghavan

I work at Yahoo! Research, and am a Consulting Professor of Computer Science here at Stanford.

I got my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from IIT, Madras, and my PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley.

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Research Interests

• Information retrieval and text/web mining
• Combinatorial optimization and randomized algorithms
• Semi-structured querying

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Some current activities

Journal Editorial Boards

• Editor in Chief, Journal of the ACM.
• Member, Editorial Board, Internet Mathematics.

Upcoming talks

• Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) 2008, Pisa.
• ECCS 2008, Jerusalem.
• SUM 2008, Napoli.

Other

• Draft of book in preparation.

• Member, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), National Academy of Sciences.
• Member, Board of Trustees, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley.
• Member, Board of Trustees, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley.

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Archival

Recent courses

• CS 276, Text retrieval and mining (with Chris Manning).
• CS 276B, Tex retrieval and mining, Winter 2005 (with Chris Manning).
• CS 276A, Text retrieval and mining, Autumn 2004 (with Chris Manning).
• CS 276, Information retrieval and web mining (with Hinrich Schutze), Fall 2003.
• CS276A and CS276B, Information Retrieval (with Chris Manning and Hinrich Schutze), Fall 2002 and Winter 2003.

• CS347, Information Retrieval and Distributed Databases, Spring 2001.

Article on graduate education and research in India, in Forbes’ special issue on India at 60.

1999 Scientific American article Hypersearching the Web.

Slides on randomized algorithms (pdf) from the 1998 AMS invited lecture.

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Some recent publications

 If you'd like a copy of any of these, send me mail at yahoo-inc.com, the userid is pragh.

• Finding Near Neighbors Through Cluster Pruning (with F. Chierichetti, A. Panconesi, M. Sozio, A. Tiberi and E. Upfal). Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, 2007.
• Visualizing tags over time (with M. Dubinko, J. Novak, R. Kumar and A. Tomkins). Proceedings of WWW 2006.
• Geographic routing in social networks (with D. Liben-Nowell, J. Novak, R. Kumar and A. Tomkins). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2005.
• Query incentive networks (with J.M. Kleinberg). Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2005.
• Variable Latent Semantic Indexing (with A. Dasgupta, R. Kumar and A. Tomkins). Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD-2005.
• Encoding XML in vector spaces (with V. Kakade). Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Retrieval, March 2005.
• Structure and evolution of Blogspace (with R. Kumar, J. Novak and A. Tomkins). Communications of the ACM, December 2004.

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A book I once wrote

Randomized Algorithms, Cambridge University Press, (with R. Motwani).

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Here are some of my favorite places to be.

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