Hugh Williams

Current

• Vice President, Search Engineering at eBay

Past

• Partner Development Manager at Microsoft Corporation
• Associate Professor at RMIT University
• Director at Williams & Williams (Self-employed)

see less...

Education

• RMIT University
• RMIT University
• STAGGS

see less...

Recommended

8 people have recommended Hugh

Connections

320 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• My Website

Hugh Williams’s Summary

I'm an innovator, motivated leader, and expert in search engines and web services. My passion is building thought-leading web services that impact the world.

I have nearly 20 years of professional computing experience. I joined eBay in July 2009, after spending 4 years managing a large R&D team at Microsoft's Bing, over 10 years researching and developing search technologies, and 5 years running my own consultancy. I've written two books for O'Reilly Media Inc.

Hugh Williams’s Specialties:

web services, information retrieval, search engines, web search, image search, video search, computational biology, technology management, innovation management, research, writing, php, mysql.

Hugh Williams’s Experience

• Vice President, Search Engineering

  eBay

  (Public Company; eBay; Internet industry)

  July 2009 — Present (5 months)

  I'm the leader of the search, merchandising, and home page development teams at eBay.

• Partner Development Manager

  Microsoft Corporation

  (Public Company; MSFT; Computer Software industry)

  April 2005 — June 2009 (4 years 3 months)

  I was a Partner at Microsoft, and a development manager in the Bing team. I'm proud to say that many of the features of the first Bing release were created by my team.
  
  I managed the development of all user-facing web search relevance features, including the left-rail explore pane (with its "table of contents"), navigational query treatments, query-biased summaries, "deeplinks", related searches, and whole page results relevance. Additionally, I managed the Powerset team in San Francisco.
  
  I also managed the end-to-end development of Internet Explorer 8's suggested sites feature, image search, video search, news search, xrank, and almost all instant answers (such as the encarta, news, images, and so on).

• Associate Professor

  RMIT University

  (Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

  January 1994 — December 2004 (11 years )

  I spent more than 10 years at RMIT University in Australia, beginning as a sessional lecturer and PhD student, and ending my career there as the Associate Professor in Information Retrieval.
  
  I published more than 70 papers on topics related to search, particularly on search data structures and algorithms, computational biology, video search, image search, and text ranking and relevance. My most-cited paper describes and experiments with techniques for compression of inverted lists for text retrieval applications.
  
  I've advised 12 graduates through their PhDs, and taught nearly 50 courses. I was awarded the Dean's prize for teaching in 2002. I attracted almost $3m in competitive grant funding, including three major Australian Research Council grants.

• Director

  Williams & Williams (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  January 1990 — December 1995 (6 years )

  For the first half of the 1990s, I ran my own consultancy, Williams & Williams. The company specialized in IT consulting to the oil, telecommunications, and property industries.

Hugh Williams’s Education

• RMIT University

  PhD , Computer Science , 1995 — 1997

• RMIT University

  BAppSc (Hons) , Computer Science , 1988 — 1990

• STAGGS

Additional Information

Hugh Williams’s Websites:

• My Website

Hugh Williams’s Interests:

search engines, information retrieval, computational biology, computer science, footy, cricket, baseball, running, cycling, my girls

Hugh Williams’s Groups:

ACM, Richmond Football Club

•    eBay Employees and Alumni Group
•    Microsoft - Current and Former Employees

Hugh Williams’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch