Innovation and Evolution – How search, social media and new ideas can shape the next web.

The Web is entering its second decade. We started by organizing the Internet as a directory and implementing automation and standard information retrieval techniques to make the Web easily available to the mass audience. During this phase, we also recognized the crucial role the topology and link structure of the Web itself plays in improving relevancy in search and discovery. This brings us to the modern era of the Web, where we need to tackle a new set of challenges, including improving the comprehensiveness and relevancy of search technologies, the user-experience of content and communication, and more. This talk will discuss the evolution of the Web, the challenges it presents, and the types of innovations required to fully capitalize on opportunities such as social media.
Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Yahoo!'s Advanced Development Division, leads Yahoo!'s efforts in building innovative products and services company-wide. His team manages programs such as Hack Yahoo!, a grassroots program to foster and harvest innovation throughout the company, and Y! Agile, a methodology for product development based on iterative design principles. Additionally Horowitz oversees the Brickhouse and Advanced Products teams, which provide resource and opportunity for the company’s next-generation innovations. Previously, he managed a portfolio of products for Yahoo! including media search, desktop search, the Yahoo! Developer Network, and the Yahoo! Toolbar.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Horowitz served as both CTO and the vice president of engineering for the Virage division of Autonomy, where he was responsible for the technical delivery of five major product lines. Prior to Autonomy, he was CTO and co-founder of Virage, the company widely recognized as the market creator and leader for advanced media indexing and analysis. Horowitz helped grow the company from "a garage startup" through its NASDAQ IPO.

Horowitz was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. While at the Media Lab, he worked on a number of topics related to computer vision, graphics and image processing, which resulted in a patented new technique for the recovery of structure, motion and camera parameters from video sequences.

Horowitz holds an MS in Media Science from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.