In Brief: Yahoo! signs on data-mining expert

Yahoo! appointed a database-systems expert as its latest research fellow.

Raghu Ramakrishnan will be helping the Internet search engine define and execute the strategy behind its social search-engine platform.

Ramakrishnan has been a computer-science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a co-founder of the Data Mining Institute.

"The combination of Raghu's expertise and Yahoo!'s huge user base and data assets will provide tremendous insight into new ways to create value for our users," said Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo!'s research group.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International