Short Bio - Marcus F. Fontoura
I have finished my Ph.D. studies in 1999, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (PUC), in a joint program with the Computer Systems Group, University of Waterloo, Canada. Since then I held research posts at the Computer Systems Group, University of Waterloo, Canada, Princeton University Computer Science Department, U.S.A., and IBM Almaden Research Center. Currently I am a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research. My main areas of research in the last years have been Computational Advertising, Enterprise and Web search, and Databases.
My Ph.D. thesis was in the area of object-oriented frameworks and product line architectures. Object-oriented frameworks and product line architectures have become popular in the software industry during the 1990s. The standardization efforts of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) provide a unique chance to harness UML as notational basis for framework development projects. However, UML does not provide adequate constructs to model frameworks. Standard UML design diagrams do not allow the marking of variation points and how they need to be instantiated. My Ph.D. work described the UML profile for framework architectures. The main contributions from this work have been condensed in the book The UML Profile for Framework Architectures, published by Addison-Wesley in 2002.
At IBM Research I co-developed a query processor for XPath queries over XML streams. This work enables very large XML documents to be concurrently processed by database system. This is an important problem for many enterprises using XML as the underlying format for storing and exchanging business data. Before this work, it was technically challenging for a Database system to handle very large XML files. This work solved this problem, enabling one of the key components of the implementation of the XML data type in the IBM DB2 Relational Database System. IBM DB2 is a leading product in the database market and the XML data representation and query processing is a key new component of that product.
In another project at IBM I was one of the key researchers developing an Enterprise Search Engine. This project resulted in a new software product for IBM - the IBM OmniFind Enterprise Search. This product is one of the leaders in the Enterprise Search space, and it is designed to help companies to find, analyze, mine and ultimately maximize the value of their unstructured information. My work on indexing is one of the key components of OmniFind. For this work I was awarded the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, with the notation for development of a new generation of IBM search technology and its deployment on w3.ibm.com.
In 2005 I have joined Yahoo! Research where I have conducted research in the design of the Contextual Advertising systems. I have designed new algorithms and software architectures that enable an advertising network (such as Yahoo!) to select the most appropriate set of advertisements for a given Web page or online query. This addresses the very important and difficult problem of automatically identifying the most suitable textual advertisements for a given Web page. This research has also very important practical applications, not only in online advertising but also Web search and semantic search.
I'm current the architect for a large-scale software platform for content serving, working at Yahoo! Research and with different software groups at Yahoo!.
Last revised: March 14th, 2010.