Had a fun meeting with Ricardo Baeza-Yates, the director of Yahoo’s new R&D center in Barcelona.
Ok, so this isn’t strictly a startup, but I think it’s great to see academics like Ricardo take the leap out of the dull safety of academia into the dynamism of a new corporate lab; and I think it’s great to see Yahoo diversify its presence (Ricardo’s research center will be jointly operated in Barcelona and Santiago, Chile- the first R&D facilities for Yahoo outside the US).
The opening of the center is an important event for Barcelona. The calibre of people who work in such facilities are the kind that every city in the world should be competing fiercely to attract.
If you don’t know about Ricardo, he’s something of a guru in the field of Information Retrieval, where much of the advanced research in search technology takes place. One of his books in particular is probably on the bookshelf of every search engineer working for Google, Yahoo, et. al.
