Career
Tuzhilin research interests include data mining, personalization, recommender systems and Communications Resource Management. He has produced more than 100 research publications. Besides Stern School of Business, he has held visiting positions at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (Paris, France). In 2001, Tuzhilin patented a method of building customer profiles and using them to recommend products and services.
Tuzhilin said of the patent, "lieutenant"s very broad and very general, and occupies some prime real estate in this space.
lieutenant essentially covers technologies that are crucial for implementation of customer relationship management." He added that the patent was careful not to stipulate that the technology was designed for Internet applications. Others pointed out that there were legal exceptions to business methods patents.
Any individuals or companies that can show they have been engaged in a business practice for at least a year before a patent application for that practice was filed may be able to circumvent the patent. In 2006, Tuzhilin was hired by Google and given access to its monitoring systems to do a study on click fraud.
This was part of a class-action settlement requiring Google to offer advertisers up to $60 million in refunds.
Tuzhilin concluded that defining and tracking click fraud will be difficult, because it is often not possible to decipher whether Web surfers were clicking on an advertising link out of malice or as part of an innocent online excursion. The University of the People is a non-profit accredited online institution of higher education headquartered in Pasadena, California, United States. Tuzhilin is part of its unpaid volunteer faculty, serving as Chairman of the University of the People Computer Science Department. In March 2012, Yahoo sued Facebook for violating 10 of its patents.
Facebook countersued Yahoo, claiming that it violated Facebook patents that covered 80% of the Yahoo’s 2011 revenues.
Three of Facebook’s patents were originally granted to Tuzhilin.