He received a Diplom degree from the Technical University of Braunschweig (Germany), and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. After postdoctoral research at the NEC Research Institute, UC Berkeley, and Bell Labs, he joined NYU Poly in the Fall of 1998. From January to December of 2008 he was also a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara, CA. His research interests are in the areas of web search engines and web mining, algorithms, databases, and distributed systems.