The turning point for Jignashu Parikh came when he moved from a state college in Gujarat to Indian Institute of Techno-logy, Bombay as a Research Associate. There his professor motivated him to invest a few years into higher studies, build on the fundamentals and gain research experience to get the most out of his potential.

Parikh resisted many high paying job offers from multinationals and focused on getting a post graduate degree in Computer Science. He cleared the GATE examination with flying colors and enrolled at the much-coveted Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Parikh’s passion for innovation elevated him to Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo! Software Development India in just about a year. Today, at the age of 26, Parikh is credited with 10 patents.

“The idea behind joining Yahoo! is the very fact that your work can impact the day to day lives of millions of users,” says Parikh, who is excited about his latest innovation, Contextual Text Analysis and Summarization. This work has recently been applied for improving Yahoo! Image Search relevance. Currently, image search on all major search engines relies on the text surrounding the images in the Web pages. In typical Web pages, only a few words around the images actually describe them. Parikh’s algorithm enables automatic annotation of images with possible words from the Web page that project the image. Searching the query words on these annotations retrieves more relevant images.

This technology is also being tested for contextual advertising which is a multi-million dollar business aimed at automatically matching the text on Web pages with contextually relevant advertisements. Parikh’s algorithm not only enhances the search experience for the users but also empowers business. Another innovation Yahoo! will file a patent for.

“For me getting a patent does not give the ultimate satisfaction; I want to see my innovation being accepted by Yahoo! as a product, which finally reaches the users,” he says. After graduation, people generally look for employment. Opting for a job is an obvious choice; to believe in yourself and projecting yourself differently, is the important thing, says Parikh. As Robert Frost said,