Q&A with Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, NTENT’s New Chief Technology Officer

July 6, 2016

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates to the NTENT Team! Ricardo will play a key role in fortifying NTENT’s innovation leadership in semantic and natural language processing and in shaping the company’s technology vision. Get to know a little more about him.

1. You have significant experience in the search space; can you please tell us a little bit about your background?

I did my PhD at Univ. of Waterloo on search algorithms related to the New Oxford English Dictionary project. At that time, the dictionary was the largest single file on the planet (a bit more than 500Mb) and searching through it was a challenge. Later, the Web appeared and it was natural to apply my expertise to Web search, where the challenge was even larger as there were million of websites with terabytes of data.

To get search usage data, I even started my own search engine for all of the Chilean Web in 2000 that lasted 15 years. This expertise triggered the proposal to Yahoo Labs to start a new European lab in 2006 in Barcelona. In 2014, I moved to the USA as VP of Research at Yahoo! and in 2015, I became Chief Research Scientist. During all these years, I kept doing research in search, particularly query mining and distributed web search.

2. What inspired you to join NTENT?

NTENT is a search company and hence, was a perfect match for my expertise, which is also complementary to the great semantic expertise that the company already has. I also found the team inspiring and each day I connect with more nice people. Thus, each day I am more motivated, reinforcing my belief that it was a great decision to join NTENT.

3. What would you say is the main thing that makes NTENT different from other players in semantic search and natural language processing?

Clearly, it is the semantic layer and understanding the need behind a person’s query. All search engines are trying to exploit a semantic angle, but I believe NTENT semantic technology can be the difference in the future of mobile search, vertical search and search in general.

4. How do you think semantic and natural language technologies are disrupting the world we live in?

With the rise of big data and (deep) machine learning, one of the main applications is natural language understanding. That implies improving very difficult problems such as text translation or summarization. Semantic understanding is the next challenge, from concepts to metaphors and ironies. These can transform how we communicate with machines from chat bots to voice commands, impacting all aspects of our lives.

5. Any fun or little known facts you would care to share about yourself? (Rumor has it from the team in CA that you’re a wicked ping pong player.)

I love maps and geography, in particular applied geography, so accordingly I have visited 77 countries. As a corollary, I love to try new things, particularly food and wine, and to take photographs that capture the diversity of people, animals, plants, and places. I also enjoy playing tennis, ping pong and foosball.

Welcome aboard, Ricardo!

To learn more about NTENT’s new CTO, Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, read our press release on Yahoo! Finance. Connect with us on LinkedIn for more on tech, mobile, search, advertising, and AI news.