Marc Najork

Last updated
Marc-Alexander Najork
Marc Najork.jpg
Born(1963-08-14)August 14, 1963
Frankfurt, Germany
EducationPh.D.
Alma mater University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Known for Information retrieval, web search
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Institutions Google DeepMind, Google Research, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation
Thesis Programming in Three Dimensions  (1994)
Doctoral advisor Simon M. Kaplan
Website https://marc.najork.org

Marc-Alexander Najork is a distinguished research scientist at Google DeepMind working on generative artificial intelligence. His career spans research at Google Research, Microsoft Research and DEC Systems Research Center on data retrieval, link-based ranking algorithms, detection of spam websites, a distributed web crawler, and a scripting system for 3D animations, among others. He has served in several leadership positions for publications and conferences of the Association for Computing Machinery. He has coauthored over a hundred research papers and holds over 40 US patents. [1] [2] He is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and AAIA Fellow.

Contents

Education

Marc graduated with a diplom in wirtschaftsinformatik from Technische Universität Darmstadt in 1989. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Overseen by Simon M. Kaplan, his thesis was on Cube, "the first visual language to employ a three-dimensional syntax." [3] The programming language was also supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. [4]

Career

In 1993, Marc joined Digital Equipment Corporation which was later merged with Compaq. One of his contributions was to Mercator, an extendable, Java-based, high-performance web crawler which was integrated into AltaVista in 2001. [5] Marc Najork and Marc Brown were the main contributors to JCAT, a Java-based algorithm animation system with classroom applications. [6] Luca Cardelli developed Obliq, which Marc used to make Obliq-3D, a fast-turnaround 3D animation system. [7]

In 2001, he joined Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. He contributed to Boxwood, a distributed, scalable B-tree which serves as a foundation for storage infrastructure. [8] The creation of PageTurner, with Dennis Fetterly and Mark Manasse, was designed to study the evolution of webpages. They also found that past behavior of changes in websites was indicative of future changes on that site. Further study of the data showed that statistical anomalies were a good predictor of spam, which led Microsoft to file a patent later used by Microsoft Bing. [9] [10] Marc also developed the Scalable Hyperlink Store, which is a scalable, fault-tolerant, and incrementally updateable database for storing large portions of a webgraph in memory. [11]

He joined the Personal Search Infrastructure team at Google in 2014 where he worked on HappyHour, a processing and serving system for structured personal data. He then became a senior director of research engineering at Google Research where he managed a team advancing the state of the art in information retrieval. [12] Marc then became a distinguished research scientist at Google Deepmind where he works on generative artificial intelligence. [13]

Honors and fellowships

Marc was along the inaugural inductees of the ACM SIGIR Academy. [14] [15] [16] He is also an IEEE Fellow, [17] ACM Fellow, [18] AAAS Fellow, [19] and AAIA Fellow. [20]

Editorial boards and conferences

Marc served both as an associate editor and editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on the Web , [21] [22] served as co-chair of the news section of the Communications of the ACM , [23] and sits on the ACM Publications Board. [24] He was conference chair of WSDM 2008 [25] and program co-chair of WSDM 2025 with Cha Meeyoung and Marie-Francine Moens. [26] In The Web Conference series, he was program co-chair of WWW 2004 [27] and WWW 2021. [28] Along with Yoelle Maarek, Marc is a co-chair of the SIGIR Academy 2025 Selection Committee. [14]

Selected publications

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Inventor: Marc Najork; Country: US; Status: GRANT;". Google Patents . Google . Retrieved 13 November 2025.
  2. ↑ Bendersky, Michael; Metzler, Donald; Najork, Marc; Wang, Xuanhui (16 December 2024). "Chapter 14: Searching Personal Collections". Advanced Topics for Information Retrieval. Association for Computing Machinery . Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  3. ↑ "Programming in three dimensions". IDEALS. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign . Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  4. ↑ Najork, Marc A.; Kaplan, Simon M. (October 1991). "The CUBE languages". Proceedings 1991 IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages. doi:10.1109/WVL.1991.238829.
  5. ↑ Mirtaheri, Seyed M.; Dinçktürk, Mustafa Emre; Hooshmand, Salman; Bochmann, Gregor V.; Jourdan, Guy-Vincent; Onut, Iosif Viorel (5 May 2014). "A Brief History of Web Crawlers". Proc. of CASCON 2013. doi:10.48550/arXiv.1405.0749. The issue of scalability was further addressed by Allan Heydon and Marc Najork in a tool called Mercator [5] in 1999....Mercator got integrated into AltaVista in 2001.
  6. ↑ Brown, Marc H.; Raisamo, Roope (October 1997). "JCAT: Collaborative active textbooks using Java". Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. 29 (14): 1577–1586. doi:10.1016/S0169-7552(97)00090-1. Marc Najork developed CAT along with the first author. The system described in this paper borrows heavily from the CAT system.
  7. ↑ MacIntyre, Blair; Feiner, Steven (24 July 1998). "A Distributed 3D Graphics Library". SIGGRAPH '98: Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques: 361–370. doi:10.1145/280814.280935. Luca Cardelli and Marc Najork of DEC SRC created Obliq and Obliq-3D, and provided ongoing help and encouragement over the years that Repo and Repo-3D have been evolving.
  8. ↑ "Boxwood: Abstractions as the Foundation for Storage Infrastructure". Department of Computer Science. UCLA . Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  9. ↑ "Fighting search spam with algorithms". SEO by the Sea. 4 April 2006. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  10. ↑ Dennis Fetterly (8 December 2004). "Using Statistical Analysis to Locate Spam Web Pages". Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). Purdue University. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  11. ↑ Marc Najork (17 June 2005). "The Scalable Hyperlink Store". Microsoft . Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  12. ↑ "Marc Najork". Google Research . Google . Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  13. ↑ "Generative Information Retrieval". SIGIR 2023. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  14. 1 2 "SIGIR Academy". Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval . Retrieved 6 November 2025.
  15. ↑ Carterette, Ben (2 December 2021). "Chair's Letter". ACM SIGIR Forum. 55 (2): 1–2. doi:10.1145/3527546.3527548.
  16. ↑ "ACM SIGIR academy to recognize contributions to information retrieval". Eurekalert . 21 March 2021. Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  17. ↑ "IEEE Computer Society Announces 2020 Fellows". IEEE Computer Society . 9 December 2019. Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  18. ↑ "2019 ACM Fellows Recognized for Far-Reaching Accomplishments that Define the Digital Age: Computing Professionals Honored for Foundational Work in Diverse Areas". Association for Computing Machinery . 11 December 2019. Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  19. ↑ "2023 AAAS Fellows". American Association for the Advancement of Science . Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  20. ↑ "Fellows". Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  21. ↑ Najork, Marc; Davison, Brian; Winslett, Marianne (May 2015). "Editorial". ACM Transactions on the Web . 9 (2). doi:10.1145/2755995.
  22. ↑ "ACM Transactions on the Web". Association for Computing Machinery . Archived from the original on 27 September 2014. Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  23. ↑ "Editorial Board". Communications of the ACM . Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on 3 May 2014.
  24. ↑ "Publications Board and Committees". Association for Computing Machinery . Retrieved 7 November 2025.
  25. ↑ "2008 Proceeding". WSDM '08: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 11 February 2008. doi:10.1145/1341531.
  26. ↑ "ACM WSDM 2025: The 18th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining". ACM WSDM. Association for Computing Machinery . Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  27. ↑ "2004 Proceeding". WWW '04: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on World Wide Web. 17 May 2004. doi:10.1145/988672.
  28. ↑ "The Web Conference". Web Conference 2021. International World Wide Web Conference Committee. Retrieved 7 November 2025.
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