Featured Researcher - Vanja Josifovski
Vanja Josifovski will proudly tell you there are plenty of computer geeks in his native country of Macedonia. “Half my high school class used the Commodore 64 and the other half had the Sinclair ZX Spectrum” he jokes. “It’s how we defined each other.”
Sort of like the Mods versus the Rockers, only with really smart kids. But Josifovski, who’s now a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, wasn’t always into computers. Growing up, he wanted to be a chemist. His father, who happened to be a computer engineer with Digital Equipment Corp., challenged him to write a computer program for chemical compounds.
“The program was a complete disaster, but it got me hooked on computers,” says Josifovski. “From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a computer scientist. I’m one of those lucky people who figure out at an early age what they want to be—and then actually become it.”
These days, Josifovski spends most of his time designing and building Yahoo!’s next-generation advertising platforms. “It’s amazing to think that the work we do can improve the internet experience for hundreds of millions of people,” he says.
That’s precisely why he joined Yahoo. Making life better for internet users is a mission near and dear to Josifovski, who is a self-described web junkie. “I feel like I live my life on the Internet,” he says. “It’s where I get my music, where I download my books, and where I get most of my news and information.”
It’s even where he went to build his house. “I really don’t think I could have done it without the Internet,” he says. “I was able to buy most of the materials, like doors and flooring, over the internet. I even used it to find my general contractor.”
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Josifovski worked as a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His focus at IBM was relational databases as well as enterprise search. He made the jump to Yahoo! Research in 2005 because he felt it was a great opportunity to make a difference in the consumer space and play a more active role in the development of leading-edge search technologies.
“Yahoo! Research has a great working environment,” he says. “I’m constantly interacting with people from all the different groups within Research, whether it’s machine learning, microeconomics, or community systems. This kind of exposure gives me a much richer understanding of the many issues and topics we deal with here.”
His own work has been highly rewarding. He has co-published a number of important research papers on such topics as text classification and contextual advertising. He’s also seen several of his Yahoo! Research projects turned into actual products.
“Yahoo! has a very efficient process for transferring our research into working products,” says Josifovski. “As a researcher, you sometimes fear your work will never see the light of day. That’s not the case at Yahoo!”
When not in the office, Josifovski spends his free time with his wife and three young children. Are the little ones being groomed for a career in computer science as well? “I’m trying not to influence them one way or another,” he says. “I believe in letting them make those decisions for themselves.”
