Kishore Papineni graduated with a PhD in Electrical Engineering specializing in feedback control theory from Rice University in 1995.

From 1995 to 2006, he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.

During this period, he worked on various natural language processing technologies such as natural language understanding, dialog management and statistical machine translation, managing IBM's SMT department from 2001-2006.

He was a founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing from 2003-2007. He joined Yahoo! Research in 2006. He now heads its Machine Learning group.

His interests include linguistic signal processing, exponential models, optimization, estimation, and control.