Computing and the Social Sciences: The Opportunity at the Interface




Prabhakar Raghavan

Chief Scientist
Yahoo!

Huang Engineering Center, Room 300
Stanford University
Friday, November 12, 2010

Abstract

The Web has highlighted the need for computer science to work closely with the social and economic sciences. By blending principles from mechanism design, algorithms, machine learning and massive distributed computing, search engines have become good at optimizing monetization on sound scientific principles. This represents a successful and growing partnership between computer science and microeconomics. When it comes to understanding how online users respond to the content and experiences presented to them, we have more of a lacuna in the collaboration between computer science and certain social sciences. Using a number of examples, we show that a critical element of this is the need to blend large-scale data analysis with smaller-scale focus groups and other techniques that are routine in the social sciences. We argue that this represents a need for a style of academic training – sociological insights driven by data mining – that does not exist today.

Speaker Bio

Prabhakar Raghavan is Senior Vice President, Yahoo’s Chief Scientist and Head of Yahoo! Labs. In his role as Chief Scientist, Raghavan is responsible for developing the long-term technical vision for Yahoo!’s business. In addition, he works to extend Yahoo!’s scientific leadership in several disciplines critical to innovation in consumer Web experiences and online advertising. At Yahoo! Labs he has overseen the growth of the research, applied science and academic relations functions globally, with major Yahoo! Labs centers of excellence in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Raghavan is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE, and Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Prior to joining Yahoo! he was Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Verity, before which he held various technical and managerial positions at IBM Research. Raghavan holds a PhD from Berkeley and is the author of textbooks on algorithms and on information retrieval, along with numerous papers and patents.

9.16.2010 dmm