Prabhakar Raghavan: This Indian-origin executive is Google's new chief technologist

In a major leadership shuffle, Google has brought changes in its team by appointing Prabhakar Raghavan as the company’s Chief Technologist. Raghvan will replace longtime Google executive Nick Fox. Until now, Prabhakar Raghavan was the senior Vice President in charge of Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products. The announcement was made by Google CEO Sundar Pichai who said in a blog post on Thursday that Raghavan will be moving into the role of chief technologist after 12 years of leading teams across the search company. Raghavan will continue to report to Pichai in the new role, CNBC reported.

“Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career,” Pichai wrote in the post. “In this role, he’ll partner closely with me and Google leads to provide technical direction and leadership and grow our culture of tech excellence.”

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The significant move comes at a time when the tech giant continues to bring restructure its team to move more quickly in the artificial intelligence arms race, where it faces increased competition, CNBC said in the reported. Google is also dealing with several antitrust lawsuits related to its search and ads business.

Who is Prabhakar Raghavan

Prabhakar Raghavan has taken over the role of Chief Technologist in Google. He holds a PhD degree from U.C. Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Prabhakar Raghavan was a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is a former editor in chief for the Journal of the ACM and was awarded a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna in 2009.

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Before joining Google, Prabhakar Raghavan founded and led Yahoo Labs where he was responsible for search and ad ranking, as well as ad marketplace design. He also served as CTO at Verity, and held various positions over the course of 14 years at IBM with a focus on algorithms, data mining and machine learning.

What will be Raghavan’s role at Google?

Raghavan is one of the foremost authorities on Search and the co-author of two widely-used graduate texts on algorithms and search, according to a webpage. He has over 20 years of research spanning algorithms, web search and databases, published over 100 papers in various fields, and holds 20 issued patents, including several on link analysis for web search.

Previously, he served as Vice President of Google Apps, Google Cloud, overseeing engineering, products and user experience. Under his leadership, the Apps business expanded from a set of consumer apps to an enterprise solution that is a major contributor to Google’s Cloud business. He also grew both Gmail and Drive past 1 billion MAUs and introduced a number of machine intelligence features in G Suite, including Smart Reply, Smart Compose, Drive Quick Access — each leading to measurable improvements in user experience, as per the Google webpage.

In 2018 he became responsible for the Ads & Commerce teams, including search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. He’s helped drive double-digit growth, while remaining centered on longstanding principles of user trust and fair value exchange among users, publishers, and advertisers.