Featured Researcher - Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Senior research scientist Evgeniy Gabrilovich spent the first 18 years of his life in Minsk, Belarus, the Eastern European country where he was born. He later moved to Israel with his family, where he spent 15 years and completed his undergraduate, graduate, and PhD studies.
His strongest influence growing up was his father, an electrical engineer who worked at the Academy of Sciences in Belarus. Evgeniy initially intended to apply for electrical engineering studies at the Institute of Electrical Engineering in Minsk, but had a change of heart when, during an entrance interview, a professor encouraged him to consider majoring in a newly opened computer science program. 2years later in 1992, he moved with his family to Israel and continued his studies at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
Evgeniy continued his studies to pursue a Master of Science degree at the Technion, focusing on theoretical aspects of natural language processing. He attributes his interest in learning new languages as an inspiration for choosing his area of focus – he learned to speak English in his childhood, and moving to Israel required him to learn Hebrew.
The one thing he was certain about after completing his master’s studies was his desire for no more school. After grad school, he joined Comverse Technology in Tel Aviv, where he worked on signals intelligence.
Three years later, the world saw the debut of the dot com era and Evgeniy saw it as an opportunity to return to his passion of natural language processing. He joined Zapper Technologies, a startup company focused on contextual search, where he worked as a core technologies team leader for their algorithms group. It was during this stint that he realized he wanted to stay in the field of natural language processing and recognized it as a promising and flourishing area. Contrary to his earlier desire for no more school, he made the decision to return to the Technion for his PhD after almost 2 years at Zapper. Coincidentally, it was the year of the dot com collapse.
Evgeniy’s PhD research evolved at a meeting point of several fields, including machine learning, artificial intelligence and text processing. He refers to his work as a fusion of these areas -- using artificial intelligence techniques for information retrieval and machine learning, and using large scale repositories of human knowledge to improve text processing.
After completing his PhD, Evgeniy joined Yahoo! Research as a senior research scientist. He chose Yahoo! because of the special emphasis placed on research. He is currently working on computational advertising – finding contextually relevant ads for Web search queries and Web pages. This new scientific discipline didn’t even exist 10 years ago, but provides algorithmic foundations for the main economic backbone of the Internet today. Evgeniy finds the work intellectually challenging and impactful. “My work involves application of principled techniques from a variety of fields as well as developing new approaches to practical problems,” he says. “Yahoo! is also well-positioned because of the huge amounts of data and computational power that we routinely use in our work.”
In his spare time, Evgeniy enjoys playing with his 1 ½ year-old son, Arthur.
