Ben Shahshahani is VP of Research at Verizon Media. His focus is on development of algorithms for improving the quality and monetization of VM’s advertising and consumer products. Ben’s areas of interest include applications of machine learning and statistical modeling in online advertising, content recommendation, and search.

Prior to returning to VM/Yahoo in October 2014, Ben was an engineering director at Google responsible for Display Campaign Optimization and Adwords Express on GDN. From 2009 to 2012 he was VP and head of Search & Media Science at Yahoo Labs where he worked on improving the quality of vertical search and media products. From 2005 to 2009 he led the sponsored search science team at Yahoo and was responsible for the quality and monetization of Yahoo’s search advertising products. Ben was an early employee of Nuance where he started as a R&D software engineer and later founded the Natural Language Processing team responsible for development of Nuance’s statistical language modeling and understanding technologies. Ben started his career at IBM as a researcher in speech recognition. He holds a PhD from Purdue University in electrical enginering.

Research Areas: Advertising Science, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Natural Language & Dialogue Understanding, Scalable Systems, User Modeling and Personalization