eBay Expands R&D Team with Addition of VP of Research and Applied Science

Data mining expert Dr. Eric Brill joins eBay following leadership roles at Microsoft and academia

San Jose, Calif.—September 24, 2009 — eBay today announced that Dr. Eric Brill is joining the company as vice president of research and applied science where he will lead the company's existing eBay Research Labs. Brill comes to eBay most recently from Microsoft where, among other roles, he founded and led that company's Text Mining, Search and Navigation Research Group.

Prior to his 10 years at Microsoft, Brill was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Computer Science and Center for Language and Speech Processing and has been a research scientist at MIT. A frequent public speaker and published author, Brill received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

"Search is all about predictions, highly educated guesses about what people really mean when they type in a word like Diesel or a phrase like 'red, white and blue'," said Mark Carges, eBay's CTO and SVP of Marketplaces Product. "Eric's expertise in natural language processing and data mining is a huge asset as we continue to improve our ability to determine customer intent and get the right products in front of the right buyer at exactly the right moment."

Source: eBay