Amitabh Kumar "Amit" Singhal is senior vice president and software engineer at Google Incorporated., a Google Fellow, and was the head of Google"s core ranking team
Education
Born in Jhansi, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, Singhal received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee in 1989. He continued his computer science education in the United States, and received an Master of Surgery degree from University of Minnesota Duluth in 1991. Singhal continued his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1996.
At Cornell, Singhal studied with Gerard Salton, a pioneer in the field of information retrieval, the academic discipline which forms the foundation of modern search.
Career
He retired February 26, 2016 from Head of Google Search. John Battelle, in his book "The Search" calls Gerard Salton "the father of digital search." He got interested in the problem of search in 1990 at the University of Minnesota Duluth. After getting a Doctor of Philosophy in 1996, Singhal joined American Telephone & Telegraph Company Labs (previously a part of Bell Labs), where he continued his research in information retrieval, speech retrieval and other related fields.
Singhal runs Google"s core search quality department.
He and his team are responsible for the Google search algorithms. According to New York Times, Singhal is the master of what Google calls its "ranking algorithm" — the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user"s question.
As a reward for his rewrite of the search engine in 2001, Singhal was named a "Google Fellow". He writes about the University of Minnesota Duluth: "UMD was the turning point in my life.
Studying Information Retrieval with Don Crouch and then Don recommending that I move to Cornell to study with Gerard Salton, is the main reason behind my success today.
Don gave me the love for search, I have just followed my passion ever since.".
Views
Quotations:
He writes about the University of Minnesota Duluth:
"UMD was the turning point in my life. Studying Information Retrieval with Don Crouch and then Don recommending that I move to Cornell to study with Gerard Salton, is the main reason behind my success today. Don gave me the love for search, I have just followed my passion ever since.".
Membership
He was elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering.