Engineering Director, Search Query Services, eBay

Brian knows the satisfaction and importance of good search results, and his team is responsible for ensuring that the millions of queries entered onto the eBay website provide just that. The words “Did you mean…?” are incredibly meaningful to Brian as he combs through a universe of queries altered by synonyms, acronyms, attributes, and expansions.
Brian is responsible for query reformulation, spell correction, and related searches as the Director of Engineering for the Search Science Query Services team at eBay.  Brian has been at eBay since 2002 in a variety of engineering management roles, including search metrics, crowdsourced human judgment, classification, data publishing, and browsing.  Prior to eBay Brian was at Handspring, Excite@Home, Synopsys, and AT&T Bell Labs.  Brian received his PHD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 1993.  His papers regarding visualizing hierarchical and categorical data with Treemaps have been cited hundreds of times.