Ben Shahshahani Returns to Yahoo Labs as VP of Advertising Sciences

NEWS
Sep 29, 2014

By Ron Brachman Ben ShahshahaniI am pleased to announce the return of Ben Shahshahani to Yahoo Labs as our new Vice President of Advertising Sciences in the United States.

Yahoo Labs is home to the company’s most forward-looking thinkers, providing deep technical expertise on scientific and technical topics of critical importance to Yahoo’s future. Advertising sciences is a crucial area for Yahoo, and Ben will lead our efforts to understand fundamental principles and create innovative technology essential to connecting advertisers to the right audiences at the right time. With Ben’s guidance, the team will focus on many key advertising-related scientific subjects, including, for example, efficiency, relevancy, engagement, ad effectiveness, marketplaces, and increasing advertiser ROI.

An accomplished engineer and researcher, Ben has years of experience that will serve him well in his new role. Most recently he served as an Engineering Director in Google’s Display Advertising team. There he managed the Display Campaign Optimization team.

Until mid-2012, Ben held the position of Vice President of Search and Media Sciences within Yahoo Labs. Among his many other responsibilities, Ben was at the helm of the development of algorithms that powered Yahoo’s search and media products including user modeling/profiling, data mining and recommendation systems, query and content processing, relevance ranking for vertical search, search assist, and page layout optimization. Ben was a long-time Yahoo, starting back in 2006.

Before Yahoo, Ben was a Research Scientist and Director of Natural Language Processing at Nuance, and part of the Speech Processing Group at IBM. Ben holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and has over a dozen issued and filed patents related to online advertising, search, natural language, and speech processing.

On a personal note, I am thrilled Ben is coming home to Yahoo. Those who worked with Ben share my enthusiasm, and our many new faces ready to greet him will benefit from his leadership and expertise. We have had an incredibly exciting year at Yahoo Labs, and I couldn’t be happier to continue that momentum with Ben’s arrival.