Andrei Broder

They emigrated to Israel in 1973, when Broder was in the second year of college in Romania, in the Electronics department at the Politehnica University of Bucharest.

After receiving a "high pass" at the reputedly hard algorithms qual, Donald Knuth, already a Turing Award and National Medal winner, offered him the opportunity to become his advisee.

At DEC SRC, Andrei was involved with AltaVista from the very beginning, helping it deal with duplicate documents and spam.

When AltaVista split from Compaq that bought DEC, Andrei became its CTO and then chief scientist and VP of research.

In 2012, Broder joined Google as a distinguished scientist, where he switched focus to another aspect of the WWW experience, large-scale personalization.

In 1998, he co-invented the first practical test to prevent robots from masquerading as human and access web sites, often referred to as CAPTCHA.