Featured Researcher: Erik Vee
Research Scientist Erik Vee always loved math. As a young child, he would draw all the time. “I thought I was going to be an artist because I loved to draw,” says Vee. However, in 5th grade, math became his new passion. Vee remembers sitting in his classroom and randomly flipping through the pages of his first algebra book to find an equation to solve. “I could only solve linear equations at the time, so when I got to the back of the book I had to be more ‘creative’,” he smiles.
Vee grew up in Moose Lake, Minnesota, where his parents both worked as teachers. His father taught math and his mother taught elementary school. Vee learned math from his dad – specifically, how to add fractions. Minnesota had a great math program for schools and held regular competitions for students. Vee was active in his school’s program and naturally continued to study the subject as his major in undergraduate school at Washington University in St. Louis.
After graduation, Vee took a year off and spent some time traveling in Europe. Graduate school followed at the University of Washington in Seattle, where his interests included physics, artificial intelligence, and math. He studied computer science since it is a “more relatable” area, then focused on perhaps the most esoteric of all computer science fields: complexity theory and lower bounds – proving that certain things are impossible to do. “As a kid, you have these dreams of becoming a famous scientist or crackpot inventor and carry these ideas through school,” says Vee. “I chose complexity theory because it was challenging.”
A post-doc stint at IBM doing work on database theory came after graduate school, where he worked with fellow Yahoo! Researchers Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins, and John Tomlin. Two years ago, Vee joined Yahoo! and met up with his former IBM peers.
“I spent the first part of my career proving that things are impossible to do,” says Vee. “At Yahoo!, there is a strong emphasis on theory but with practical applications.” His first project was to make the collaborative filtering engine more scalable at HotJobs – Yahoo!’s job searching Web site. “I like that I constantly have impact on things here, where a simple, elegant idea can have huge significance,” says Vee. “It’s exciting to see something you dreamed up implemented in the real world.”
These days, Vee works on projects in display advertising, specifically, guaranteed ad delivery. He looks forward to continuing his work at Yahoo!, one of the largest Internet destinations in the world.
