Andrei Zary Broder (born April 12, 1953 in

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north of ...

) is a distinguished scientist at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. Previously, he was a

research fellow A research fellow is an academic research position at a university or a similar research institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a pr ...

and

vice president A vice president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vice president is on t ...

of computational advertising for

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

, and before that, the vice president of research for

AltaVista AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

. He has also worked for

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...

as a distinguished

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the l ...

and was CTO of IBM's Institute for Search and Text Analysis.

Education and career

Broder was born in

, Romania, in 1953. His parents were medical doctors, his father a noted oncological surgeon. They emigrated to Israel in 1973, when Broder was in the second year of college in Romania, in the Electronics department at the Bucharest Polytechnic. He was accepted at

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology ( he, הטכניון – מכון טכנולוגי לישראל) is a public research university located in Haifa, Israel. Established in 1912 under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, the Technion ...

, in the EE Department. Broder graduated from Technion in 1977, with a B.Sc. summa cum laude. He was then admitted to the PhD program at Stanford, where he initially planned to work in the systems area. His first adviser was Prof.

John L. Hennessy John Leroy Hennessy (born September 22, 1952) is an American computer scientist, academician and businessman who serves as Chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. as well as Atheros and served as t ...

. After receiving a "high pass" at the reputedly hard algorithms qual, Prof.

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...

, already a Turing Award and National Medal winner, offered him the opportunity to become his advisee. Broder finished his PhD under Don Knuth in 1985. He then joined the newly founded

DEC Systems Research Center The Systems Research Center (SRC) was a research laboratory created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1984, in Palo Alto, California. DEC SRC was founded by a group of computer scientists, led by Robert Taylor, who left the Computer ...

in Palo Alto. At DEC SRC, Andrei was involved with

from the very beginning, helping it deal with duplicate documents and spam. When

split from

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

that bought DEC, Andrei became its CTO and then chief scientist and VP of research. In 2002, he joined

in New York to build its enterprise search product. In 2005, he returned to Silicon Valley and the Web Industry, as a Yahoo Fellow and vice president. There, he put the bases of a new discipline, Computational advertising, the science of matching ads to users and contexts. At Yahoo, Broder also helped build

Yahoo! Research Yahoo!, once one of the most popular web sites in the United States, is as of September 2021 a content sub-division of the namesake company Yahoo (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., owned by Apollo Global Management (90%) and Verizon Communications (10%) ...

into one of the leading Web research organizations. Broder was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

in 2010 for his contributions to the science and engineering of the World Wide Web. In 2012, Broder joined

as a distinguished scientist, where he switched focus to another aspect of the WWW experience, large-scale personalization.

Contributions

In 1989, he discovered (independently from

David Aldous David John Aldous FRS (born 13 July 1952) is a mathematician known for his research on probability theory and its applications, in particular in topics such as exchangeability, weak convergence, Markov chain mixing times, the continuum random ...

) an algorithm for generating a

uniform spanning tree A uniform is a variety of clothing worn by members of an organization while participating in that organization's activity. Modern uniforms are most often worn by armed forces and paramilitary organizations such as police, emergency services, se ...

of a given graph. Over the last fifteen years, Broder pioneered several algorithms systems and concepts fundamental to the science and technology of the

WWW The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

. Some of the highlights include: In 1997, Broder led the development of the first practical solution for finding near-duplicate documents on web-scale using "

shingling {{about, the industrial steel manufacturing process, the text mining technique, w-shingling Shingling was a stage in the production of bar iron or steel, in the finery and puddling processes. As with many ironmaking terms, this is derived from ...

" to reduce the problem to a set-intersection problem and "min-hashing" or to construct "sketches" of sets. This was a pioneering effort in the area of

locality-sensitive hashing In computer science, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is an algorithmic technique that hashes similar input items into the same "buckets" with high probability. (The number of buckets is much smaller than the universe of possible input items.) Since ...

. In 1998, he co-invented the first practical test to prevent robots from masquerading as human and access web sites, often referred to as

CAPTCHA A CAPTCHA ( , a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. The term was coined in 2003 b ...

. In 2000, Broder, then at AltaVista, together with colleagues from IBM and DEC SRC, conducted the first large-scale analysis of the Web graph, and identified the bow-tie model of the

web graph The webgraph describes the directed links between pages of the World Wide Web. A graph, in general, consists of several vertices, some pairs connected by edges. In a directed graph, edges are directed lines or arcs. The webgraph is a directed graph ...

. Around 2001–2002, Broder published an opinion piece where he qualified the differences between classical information retrieval and Web search and introduced a now widely accepted classification of web queries into navigational, information, and transactional.

Awards and honors

He is a

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

and the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

. He was one of the recipients of the 2012 ACM

Paris Kanellakis Award The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award is granted yearly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to honor "specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing". It wa ...

for his work on

w-shingling In natural language processing a ''w-shingling'' is a set of ''unique'' ''shingles'' (therefore ''n-grams'') each of which is composed of contiguous subsequences of tokens within a document, which can then be used to ascertain the similarity be ...

and min-hashing, and he won this award again in 2020, together with Yossi Azar,

Anna Karlin Anna R. Karlin is an American computer scientist, the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Biography Karlin was born into an academic family. Her father, Samuel Karlin, was a mathematician at ...

Michael Mitzenmacher Michael David Mitzenmacher is an American computer scientist working in algorithms. He is Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and was area dean of computer science July 2010 to ...

, and

Eli Upfal __NOTOC__ Eli Upfal is a computer science researcher, currently the Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics and statistics at the Hebrew University, Israel in 1978, ...

for their work on the power of two choices.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Broder, Andrei 1953 births Living people Scientists from Bucharest Yahoo! employees IBM employees American technology chief executives American computer businesspeople American computer scientists American people of Romanian-Jewish descent Israeli computer scientists Israeli emigrants to the United States Stanford University alumni Technion – Israel Institute of Technology alumni Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Romanian emigrants to Israel