Featured Researcher - Brian Cooper
Like many young kids, Brian Cooper got a personal computer for his eighth birthday. The difference, of course, is that back in 1983 most people had never heard of a PC. “I’m pretty sure I was the first kid on the block with one,” says the 32-year-old Cooper.
But much to his parents’ chagrin, Cooper had little interest in playing games on his new computer. Instead, he spent his time tinkering with the programming language and figuring out how the games were written. Pretty soon, he was writing his own programs.
“I would make tic-tac-toe and checkers programs, and then give them to my parents on a floppy disk for Christmas,” he says.
No one in his family was surprised when, 20 years later, Cooper became a computer science professor at Georgia Tech. Though he loved teaching, he was always pressing his industry friends for access to real data and systems—rare commodities in the world of academia.
“I was constantly trying to figure out how thing really worked at places like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft,” he says. “I realized that if I wanted to pursue the kind of research I was interested in, rather than trying to reverse engineer how Yahoo! worked, I should just go work there.”
Fate was set in motion on a visit to the Bay Area in 2006. Cooper kept hearing about Yahoo!’s new research lab from friends and colleagues at Stanford University, where he earned his Ph.D.
“Everyone was buzzing about this great lab where people could work on these fascinating problems in a free and open environment,” he says. “It really intrigued me.”
Soon after, Cooper sat down for coffee with Raghu Ramakrishnan, a vice president and Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research, at the SIGMOD database conference. “He laid out the vision of the company, the projects he was working on, and the impact they would have. I immediately knew that Yahoo! was the place for me.”
Since his arrival at Yahoo! Research in September of last year, Cooper has participated in a number of exciting projects, including PNUTS and Zookeeper. He says the most thrilling thing about being at Yahoo! is helping to plot the future of the internet.
“I often wonder how I ever survived without Yahoo! Maps. It’s amazing to think that we are now developing the next generation of products that, in three to five years time, people won’t believe they ever lived without. That’s really why I’m here.”
Cooper also loves being back in the Bay Area with his wife and two young children. “You can hike along the beach and watch whales migrate, and the next day you can be skiing in Tahoe,” he says. “There are 87,000 things to do in the Bay Area, all within driving distance.” Most recently, he and his kids discovered a great petting zoo only minutes from their house.
After a full year at Yahoo!, Cooper says he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. “This is the place to be if you want to make a big impact,” he explains. “Where else but Yahoo! can you work on projects that have the potential to touch 500 million people each month?”
