Prior to that he was a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! and a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC). He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. As an active member of the information retrieval, Web search, and natural language processing research communities, he has served on the senior program committees of SIGIR, CIKM, and WWW, and is a member of the Information Retrieval Journal and ACM TOIS' editorial boards. He has published over 50 research papers, has 2 patents granted, 14 patents pending, and is the author of "A Feature-Centric View of Information Retrieval" and co-author of "Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice".