Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich (September 13, 1964, Nizhny Novgorod — July 27, 2013, London) was a Russian programmer and public figure, co-founder and chief technology officer of the company Yandex, and one of the key architects of Russian-language internet search. He was born in Nizhny Novgorod and spent his childhood in Alma-Ata because of his parents' work as geologists.[1]

Biography and education

Segalovich's father was a geologist who in the 1960s discovered the largest chromite deposits in the CIS, "40 Years of the Kazakh SSR" and "Voskhod", and was awarded government honors for it.[1] In Alma-Ata, Ilya attended School No. 54, and from seventh grade the Republican Physics and Mathematics School (RFMSh), where from 1977 to 1981 he shared a desk with Arkady Volozh. In 1981 both received gold medals; Segalovich took second place at the All-Union Mathematics Olympiad.[1]

An attempt to enter the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University together with Volozh was unsuccessful. From 1981 to 1986, Segalovich studied at the Geophysics Faculty of the Sergo Ordzhonikidze Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute (MGRI). After graduating, he worked for several years at VIMS (the All-Union Institute of Mineral Resources), where he wrote geophysical programs in Fortran and published in the "Izvestiya of the USSR Academy of Sciences", Physics of the Earth series.[1]

Career and the creation of Yandex

Around 1990, Segalovich joined the company Arkadia, founded by Volozh, becoming head of its software group. There he began developing a full-text morphological search program. In 1993 he wrote the program morforazbor, which processed 100,000 Russian words in 300 kilobytes of RAM at a speed of 1,000 words per second.[1]

From 1993 to 2000, he headed the search systems department at CompTek International, and from 1995 he was also lead programmer and head of the development group at CJSC Comtek. Together with Volozh, he developed the International Patent Classification and a search system for the text of the Bible with morphological analysis of the Russian language, and then the Yandex program for searching files on hard drives.[2] It was Segalovich who came up with the word "Yandex".[3]

In 2000, together with Volozh, he founded the company Yandex (LLC Yandex), where for the rest of his life he served as chief technology officer and director of technology and development, and was also a member of the board of directors. Segalovich was the architect of the search technologies and the initiator of the creation of the services Yandex.News, Yandex.Market, Yandex.Direct, and the Yandex Encyclopedia; the projects associated with his name include the voice assistant "Alice" and the self-driving car.[2] He owned 4.15% of the company's shares; according to Forbes, in 2011 his fortune was estimated at $600 million (159th place in the ranking of Russia's richest entrepreneurs).[1]

Philanthropy

Segalovich took an active part in charitable work. In 1997, with his participation, the "Children of Maria" rehabilitation art center for orphans and children with developmental disabilities was founded; his wife, Maria Eliseeva, became its director.[3] In 2005, Segalovich was awarded a national public prize in the field of volunteering.[3]

Illness and death

In the fall of 2012, Segalovich was diagnosed with stomach cancer; he continued to work full time throughout his course of treatment. Six months later, doctors discovered a brain tumor. In critical condition, he was admitted to a clinic in London, where he died on July 27, 2013, at the age of 48.[2] He was buried on August 1, 2013, at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.[2]

In January 2019, Yandex established the annual Ilya Segalovich Science Prize, awarded for achievements in speech recognition and synthesis, search and data analysis, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and machine translation.[2]

Nizhny Novgorod Connection

Ilya Segalovich was born on September 13, 1964, in Nizhny Novgorod (then Gorky). The family soon moved to Kazakhstan because of his parents' geological work, and the rest of his childhood and youth were spent in Alma-Ata.[1] Nizhny Novgorod remains the birthplace of one of the creators of Russia's largest search engine.

Sources

  1. tadviser.ru — Segalovich Ilya Valentinovich
  2. rus.team — Segalovich Ilya Valentinovich — One of the Founders of Yandex — Biography
  3. corporacia.ru — Segalovich Ilya Valentinovich
  4. rosmanager.ru — Segalovich Ilya Valentinovich — Biography and Family