Reiner Kraft
| Reiner Kraft | |
|---|---|
| File:Reiner Kraft.pngReiner Kraft.png Reiner Kraft | |
| Born | Gießen, West Germany |
| 🏫 Education | University of California, Santa Cruz (PhD, 2005) |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| 🏅 Awards | MIT Technology Review TR100 (2002) |
Reiner Kraft is a German computer scientist and entrepreneur known for his work on search technology at IBM Research and Yahoo!. He was named to the MIT Technology Review list of top innovators under 35 (TR100) in 2002.[1]
Early life and education
Kraft was born in Gießen, Germany.[2] He received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005, advised by Raymie Stata.[3][4]
Career
IBM Research
From 1997 Kraft worked as a software engineer at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.[2] He co-invented a scheme for distributing large computing tasks over the Internet to many personal computers, for which IBM filed a patent application in 1998, and he created jCentral and xCentral, specialized search engines for Java and XML resources.[1][5] By 2004 he had filed more than 100 patent applications, and IBM had awarded him the title of Master Inventor. WirtschaftsWoche described him at the time as the most prolific inventor in Silicon Valley.[2] Kraft is named as an inventor on more than 110 granted United States patents.[6]
Yahoo!
Kraft joined Yahoo! in 2004, recruited from IBM, and worked there on search technology. WirtschaftsWoche credited him with devising Y!Q, a contextual search tool that Yahoo began testing in February 2005.[7] His research there focused on contextual search, including the Y!Q system, which used the content a user was reading to refine web searches.[8][9]
Zalando
By 2017 Kraft was vice president of engineering at the Berlin-based online retailer Zalando, where he was responsible for developing technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual reality.[10]
Later career
In 2019 Kraft joined the leadership team of Yunar, a loyalty-program app operated by Deutsche Bank subsidiary Ambidexter GmbH, with responsibility for technology and data.[11] In 2025 Kraft co-founded EVER Health GmbH, a health software company based in Lahnau.[12]
Recognition
- 2002: Named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 list of top innovators under 35.[1]
- IBM Master Inventor.[2]
Selected publications
- Kraft, Reiner; Zien, Jason (2004). Mining anchor text for query refinement. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on World Wide Web. doi:10.1145/988672.988763.
- Kraft, Reiner; Maghoul, Farzin; Chang, Chi Chao (2005). Y!Q: contextual search at the point of inspiration. CIKM. doi:10.1145/1099554.1099746.
- Kraft, Reiner; Chang, Chi Chao; Maghoul, Farzin; Kumar, Ravi (2006). Searching with context. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on World Wide Web. doi:10.1145/1135777.1135847.
- Irmak, Utku; von Brzeski, Vadim; Kraft, Reiner (2009). Contextual ranking of keywords using click data. IEEE 25th International Conference on Data Engineering. doi:10.1109/ICDE.2009.76.
- Irmak, Utku; Kraft, Reiner (2010). A scalable machine-learning approach for semi-structured named entity recognition. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web. doi:10.1145/1772690.1772738.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Reiner Kraft". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Hohensee, Matthias (8 July 2004). "Filet im Internet". WirtschaftsWoche (in Deutsch). No. 29. p. 74.
- ↑ "Reiner Kraft". Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ "Reiner Kraft". Storage Systems Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ Zodik, Gabi; Ford, Daniel; Pinter, Ron; Nicol, David; Kraft, Reiner; Lu, Qi; Eichstaedt, Matthias (1999). jCentral: Search the Web for Java. Eighth International World Wide Web Conference.
- ↑ "Granted US patents with inventor Reiner Kraft". Google Patents. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ Göttert, Jean-Marc; Hohensee, Matthias (10 February 2005). "Einfach umgeleitet". WirtschaftsWoche (in Deutsch). No. 7. pp. 80–82.
- ↑ Kraft, Reiner; Maghoul, Farzin; Chang, Chi Chao (2005). Y!Q: contextual search at the point of inspiration. Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). doi:10.1145/1099554.1099746.
- ↑ Kraft, Reiner; Chang, Chi Chao; Maghoul, Farzin; Kumar, Ravi (2006). Searching with context. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on World Wide Web. doi:10.1145/1135777.1135847.
- ↑ Gustavsson, David (23 May 2017). "AI-expert: Rädslan för massarbetslöshet överdriven". Realtid (in svenska).
- ↑ "Yunar startet erfolgreich und zieht nach Berlin" (Press release) (in Deutsch). Deutsche Bank. 22 February 2019.
- ↑ "Handelsregister B, Amtsgericht Wetzlar, HRB 9344: EVER HEALTH GmbH" (in Deutsch). Amtsgericht Wetzlar. 4 March 2025.
External links
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