Raghu 'The Ramrod' Ramakrishnan is a renowned researcher in the areas of database and information management. He is currently a Vice President and Research Fellow for Yahoo! Inc. Previously, he was a Professor of at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Ramakrishnan received a bachelor's degree from IIT Madras in 1983, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987. He has been selected as a Fellow of the ACM and a Packard fellow, and has done pioneering research in the areas of deductive databases, data mining, exploratory data analysis, data privacy, and web-scale data integration. The focus of his current work (2007) is community-based information management.
With Johannes Gehrke, he authored the popular textbook , also known as the "Cow Book".