Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates areas of expertise are information retrieval, web search and data mining, data science and algorithms.
He was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from January 2006 to February 2016.
He is part time Professor at DTIC of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, as well as at DCC of Universidad de Chile in Santiago.
Until 2004 he was Professor and founding director of the Center for Web Research at the later place.
He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989.
He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award.
From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the board of governors of the IEEE Computer Society and in 2012 he was elected for the ACM Council.
Since 2010 is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering.
In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions.

Lecture Abstract

Visual Congruent Ads for Image Search

The quality of user experience online is affected by the relevance and placement of advertisements. We propose a new system for selecting and displaying visual advertisements in image search result sets. Our method compares the visual similarity of candidate ads to the image search results and selects the most visually similar ad to be displayed. The method further selects an appropriate location in the displayed image grid to minimize the perceptual visual differences between the ad and its neighbors. We conduct an experiment with about 900 users and find that our proposed method provides significant improvement in the users’ overall satisfaction with the image search experience, without diminishing the users’ ability to see the ad or recall the advertised brand. This is joint work with Yannis Kalantidis, Ayman Faharat, Lyndon Kennedy and David A. Shamma.