Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates (born March 21, 1961) is a Chilean computer scientist and currently VP for Europe and Latin America leading the Yahoo! Research labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. His Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo was entitled Efficient Text Searching, supervised by Gaston Gonnet and granted in 1989.
His research interests include:
- Algorithms and data structures. His contributions include algorithms for string search such as the Shift Or Algorithm and algorithms for Fuzzy string searching, inspiring also the Bitap algorithm; co-author of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures ISBN 0-201-14218-X with his former Ph.D. advisor Gaston Gonnet,
- Information retrieval. Co-author of Modern Information retrieval Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-39829-X, first edition in 1999 and second edition in 2011,
- Web retrieval and mining. Baeza-Yates funded in 2002 and directed until 2005 the Center for Web Research in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Chile,
- Information visualization
In August 2008, Dr. Baeza-Yates was proposed for the Chilean National Prize in Applied Sciences (Premio Nacional de Ciencias Aplicadas) He was proposed again in 2010 and 2012. He is corresponding member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences (2003) and founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering (2010). He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2009). and an IEEE Fellow (2011).