About me

I am currently at Google, working on various aspects of Search Quality. I am particularly interested in query understanding and helping users formulate better queries.

Prior to joining Google I was the Chief Architect and then CTO of Stratify, Inc.  There I helped develop the very successful Stratify Legal Discovery service. Stratify was acquired by Iron Mountain.

Prior to joining Stratify, I was a Research Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center. While at NASA I served as the Deputy Lead of the Remote Agent project. The Remote Agent was the first Artificial Intelligence system to be given primary command of a spacecraft.

I received a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Bombay, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. My Ph.D. dissertation, Automated Modeling of Physical Systems, was an ACM Distinguished Dissertation.

I co-teach Information Retrieval with Chris Manning and Prabhakar Raghavan in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.  In the past I created and taught a class on Reasoning Methods in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford.

Contact information 

Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
nayak at cs dot stanford dot edu