Vanja Josifovski is Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research. He joined Yahoo! Research in late 2005 and has since spent most of his time designing and building Yahoo!'s next generation advertising platforms.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Vanja was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center where he joined the Exploratory Databases department in 2000.

His initial research focus was on integration of non-relational data sources with relational databases. He was a key member of the team that productized the Garlic research framework within the IBM’s DB2 database system, contributing many enhancements to DB2’s query compilation and runtime technology.

In 2002 Dr. Josifovski become a member of the DB2 Native XML Team as an Architect of the XML Navigation component that evaluates queries over the native XML store.

In early 2005 Vanja joined IBM’s Enterprise Search Team and explored architectures for low-latency incremental indexing of textual and XML documents in Content Management systems.

Vanja has published over forty peer reviewed publications, has authored around 20 patent applications, and has been on the program committees of WWW, SIGIR, ICDE, VLDB, SIGKDD and other major conferences in the database, information retrieval and search areas. He is also one of the principal authors of the ISO-ANSI SQL Standard Part 9 defining mediation of external data in relational databases.

He holds a MSc degree from University of Florida and a PhD degree from Linkopings University in Sweden.

Vanja can be contacted at vanjaj ATSIGN yahoo-inc DOT com