Ramanathan V. Guha

guha @ guha.com

Education

  • Stanford, '91 PhD (Computer Science)
  • UC Berkeley, '87 MS (Mechanical Engineering)
  • IIT Madras, '86 BTech (Mechanical Engineering)

Work Experience

  • May 2025 to present: Microsoft Technical Fellow, working on NLWeb.
  • August to December 2024: OpenAI, Technical Advisor to the CEO.
  • November 2017 to August 2024: Google Fellow. Working on Data Commons.
  • May 2005 to January 2016: Google Fellow. Started Custom Search, Search based keyword tool, and Schema.org.
  • April 2002 to April 2005: Research Staff Member, IBM Almaden Theory group.
  • September 2000 to January 2002: Co-Founder of Alpiri. Built TAP, a system for large scale data integration and its use in search. TAP was eventually absorbed as a research project by the Knowledge Systems Lab at Stanford.
  • May 1999 to May 2000: Cofounder, CTO and head of engineering, Epinions, a web site where consumers write reviews on products and services. I architected and built the site. Responsible for the core concepts behind Epinions, such as the Web of Trust, an adaptation of PGP like Web of Trust concepts to content ranking & search and Eroyalties, a mechanism for micropayments.
  • April 97 to April 99: Principal Engineer, Netscape Communications. Created RSS, RDF (with the W3C) and helped start the Open Directory Project. I also helped create some interesting browser features such as the embedding of server side functionality into the browser and the predecessor to XUL.
  • June 95 to April 97: Principal Scientist, Apple Computer. I developed the Meta Content Framework (MCF) and the FlyThru system for the visualization for extremely large hierarchies.
  • May 87 to December 94: Co-leader of the Cyc Project, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. I was responsible for the design and implementation of key parts of the Cyc system, including, CycL, the representation language used by Cyc, the top layers of the Cyc KB and the Cyc Natural Language understanding system.

Courses Taught

Building Large Knowledge-based Systems: Spring Quarters of 1988, 1990, 1992 and 1994 at Stanford University in the Computer Science department and in the winter semester of 1990 at the UT Austin.

Patents

Approx 35 granted patents

Technical Writings

Book
Standards Related Publications
  • RDF Site Summary (RSS) 0.9, 4/99 and 1.0, 6/2000, Dan Brickley, Rael Dornfest, R.V.Guha, et. al. RSS is the most widely used content syndication format on the web.
  • RDF Schema Specification, W3C Recommendation, 3/2000, Daniel Brickley, R.V.Guha (editors)
  • Meta Content Framework Using XML, 6/97, W3C Technical Note, R.V.Guha, Tim Bray
Selected Conference, Symposium and Journal Papers
  • A First Order Theory of Contexts. S. Makarios, R. Guha. Intl. Conference on Contexts, 2005
  • Unweaving a Web of Documents. R. Guha, R. Kumar, R. Sivakumar KDD 2005
  • Predictive Power of Online Chatter. D. Gruhl, R. Guha, R. Kumar, J. Novack, A. Tomkins. KDD 2005
  • Open Rating Systems: R. Guha. 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web, 2004
  • Information Propagation in Blogspace: D. Gruhl, R. Guha, D. Liben-Nowell, A. Tomkins. WWW 2004
  • Propagation of Trust and Distrust: R.V.Guha, Ravi Kumar, P. Raghavan, A. Tomkins. WWW 2004
  • Object Co-identification, R.V.Guha. AAAI Spring Symposium on Semantic Web Services, 2004
  • TAP: A Semantic Web Toolkit, R.V.Guha and Rob McCool. Semantic Web Journal, Oct. 2003
  • TAP: A Semantic Web Platform, R.V.Guha and Rob McCool. Journal of Network Computing, Sept. 2003
  • Varieties of Contexts, R.V.Guha, John McCarthy, Fourth International Conference on Contexts, June 2003
  • Semantic Search, R.V.Guha, Rob McCool and Eric Miller, WWW2003
  • SemTag and Seeker, Bootstrapping the Semantic Web, with Andrew Tomkins, Sridhar Rajagopal, et. al. WWW2003
  • Contexts: a formalization and some applications, R.V.Guha, 12/91, Stanford University PhD thesis report.
  • Cyc: A Mid-Term Report, R.V.Guha and D.Lenat, AI Magazine, Vol 11, No. 3, Fall 1990.
  • Cyc: Towards Programs with Common Sense, D.Lenat, R.V.Guha, K.Pittman, D.Pratt and M. Shepherd, Communications of the ACM, Vol.33, No.8, August 1990.
  • Enabling Agents to Work Together, R.V.Guha and D.Lenat, 6/94, Communications of the ACM, Vol.37, No.7, 1994.