Benjamin Liebald

abpxy9@r.postjobfree.com www.benjaminliebald.com

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Experienced software engineer with proven track record building massively scalable data mining and machine learning

applications for the world s largest websites. Expert knowledge of C++, Python, Mapreduce, Bigtable & Distributed

Systems. Several years of experience leading teams of all sizes through all phases of the software development cycle.

EXPERIENCE

2012 to date YouTube, Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager for YouTube Personalization: Responsible for a team of 12+ engineers

working on all aspects of personalizing the user experience on the world s largest video sharing

site.

2009 to date YouTube, Sta Software Engineer

Tech Lead for personalized video discovery: Leading a team that develops personalization and

discovery technologies to help users nd and engage with videos tailored to their interests.

Designed, implemented, and maintained systems for computing video and channel recommen-

dations that work on large-scale data sets (terabytes of data, hundreds of millions of users and

items). Successfully used large-scale machine learning systems for ranking and candidate gener-

ation.

Designed, built and deployed scalable backend systems to serve personalized content across the

YouTube website and apps. These systems are called for every single request to the YouTube

homepage.

Published an overview paper on YouTube s recommendation system in the ACM RecSys confer-

ence 2010.

2006 to 2009 Google Inc., Software Engineer

Worked on various projects in Search Ranking, web spam, and content discovery.

Designed and implemented data-mining and machine learning applications on top of Google s

distributed systems and logs processing infrastructure (GFS, Mapreduce, Bigtable, Sawzall) that

routinely processed hundreds of terabytes of data and ran on hundreds of machines.

Led engineering team to develop personalization and recommendation features on various Google

properties (Video, Product Search, iGoogle.).

Developed software in C++, Python, Java, and various proprietary languages and tools.

2005 to 2006 Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Research Assistant

Worked with Prof. Dan Roth.

As part of my Master s thesis research, Applied machine learning algorithms and techniques to

anomaly detection systems for a research project.

Project software implemented in Python and C++.

Research results published in AAAI conference 2008.

Summer 2003 Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Internship at the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering (RSISE): Worked on

sensor control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.

EDUCATION

May 2006 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL Master of Science (MSc) in Computer Science

Research interests: Arti cial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Security

Thesis topic: Machine Learning Schemes For Active Intrusion Detection

Advisor: Prof. Dan Roth

Cumulative GPA: 4.0/4.0, Major GPA: 4.0/4.0

May 2004 International University Bremen, Germany Bachelor of Science (BSc.) in Electrical Engineering

& Computer Science

Undergraduate research in Robotics (Robocup), Signal processing, Machine Learning.

Bachelor s thesis: Exploration of di erent network topologies on the ESN signal crosscorrelation ma-

trix spectrum

Member of IUB s Robocup team, working on soccer and rescue robots. Participated in Robocup World

Championships 2003 in Fukuoka, Japan.

Cumulative GPA: 4.0/4.3, Major GPA: 4.1/4.3

AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS

2010 to date First alumni member on Board of Directors of the Jacobs University Foundation of America, a

501(c)(3) approved fundraising organization for Jacobs University Bremen in the United States.

2004-2005 Richard T. Cheng Graduate Fellowship, University of Illinois, Department of Computer Science.

2003-2006 Scholar of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes)

2001-2004 Member of the President s List for outstanding academic achievement, International University Bre-

men (now Jacobs University Bremen)

2001-2004 Full merit-based undergraduate scholarship, International University Bremen (now Jacobs University

Bremen)

SKILLS

Programming languages: C++, Python, Sawzall (solid, day-to-day usage); Java, Matlab (intermediate); PHP,

Javascript, HTML (some knowledge).

Expert knowledge in writing distributed applications using Mapreduce, GFS, Bigtable that run on hundreds to

thousands of machines.

Several years of experience as technical lead and manager for small and large engineering teams. Participated in

multiple Engineering Leadership courses at Google.

Languages: German (mother tongue), English (near native), French (intermediate), Spanish (basic).

PUBLICATIONS

James Davidson, Benjamin Liebald, Junning Liu, Palash Nandy, Taylor Van Vleet, et al. The YouTube video recom-

mendation system. RecSys 10: Proceedings of the fourth ACM conference on Recommender systems, 2010

Benjamin Liebald, Dan Roth, Neelay Shah, Vivek Srikumar. Proactive Intrusion Detection. Proceedings of the 23rd

AAAI conference on Arti cial Intelligence, 2008

Holger Kenn, Stefano Carpin, Max P ngsthorn, Benjamin Liebald, Ioan Hepes, Catalin Ciocov, Andreas Birk. FAST-

Robotics: a rapid-prototyping framework for intelligent mobile robotics. Proceedings of the 2003 IASTED International

Conference on Arti cial Intelligence and Applications, 2003

Andreas Birk et al. The IUB 2002 Smallsize League Team. In Gal Kaminka, Pedro U. Lima, and Raul Rojas, editors,

RoboCup-02: Robot Soccer World Cup VI, Lecture Notes on Arti cial Intelligence. Springer, 2002.

Andreas Birk et al. The IUB 2002 Rescue Robot Team. In Gal Kaminka, Pedro U. Lima, and Raul Rojas, editors,

RoboCup-02: Robot Soccer World Cup VI, Lecture Notes on Arti cial Intelligence. Springer, 2002.

Contact this candidate