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SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug 12, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) this week convened more than 200 of the company's leading scientists to examine the most important trends and questions about the future of the Web at Yahoo! Labs' annual Science Week event. Yahoo! also celebrated the fifth anniversary of Yahoo! Labs, one of the world's premier industrial research organizations.
"Yahoo! Labs is tackling the biggest scientific questions facing the industry and Yahoo! -- from how to define what's personally meaningful to the billions of people online, to investigating what the Web can teach us about ourselves and society," said Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo!'s chief scientist and head of Yahoo! Labs. "I joined Yahoo! with the belief that we would be the ultimate environment for inventing the new sciences of the Internet, and in the past five years that belief has been proven true time and time again. Our scientists conduct research at unparalleled scale in the real world."
Highlighted topics at this year's Yahoo! Labs Science Week include:
Formally created in 2005, Yahoo! Labs has expanded globally with offices in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, and the Middle East. Scientists at Yahoo! Labs have made significant contributions to the industry by producing more than 1,000 papers, workshops, and presentations for conferences and academic journals. Labs scientists have won numerous "best paper" awards, including seven in 2009 and four to date in 2010.
"Yahoo! Labs is a unique industrial research lab which promotes academic-style research that advances the frontiers of science, but wisely focuses on a few areas key to Yahoo!'s business," said Jeannette M. Wing, the president's professor of computer science and department head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, and the former assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF). "It also engages directly and openly with the academic community, providing academics resources to which the community otherwise would not have access to. For example, through a partnership with the National Science Foundation, Yahoo!, along with HP and Intel, through their Open Cirrus effort, helped provide a cluster computer hosted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This industry-government-academia collaboration enabled the entire academic community reached by the NSF, to conduct novel experimental research in cloud computing."
In addition to advancing a variety of technical disciplines, such as information retrieval, Web mining, microeconomics, social systems, and machine learning, Yahoo! Labs has made many contributions to Yahoo! by building cutting-edge science into the company's products and computing infrastructure. Science and engineering teams at Yahoo! continually improve Yahoo!'s business by analyzing real-world data to extend Yahoo!'s competitive advantage in a number of categories, from online advertising to media, communications, and content discovery.
These innovations from Yahoo! Labs leverage Yahoo!'s global platforms and technology infrastructure with both the Yahoo! Cloud and Hadoop -- the latter an open-source technology pioneered by Yahoo! that sits at the epicenter of big data and cloud computing -- making it possible for Yahoo! Labs' scientists to conduct experiments at scale, iterate on systems and algorithms, and crunch the massive amounts of data generated on the Web.
About Yahoo!
Yahoo! attracts hundreds of millions of users
every month through its innovative technology and engaging content and
services, making it one of the most visited Internet destinations and a
world-class online media company. Yahoo!'s vision is to be the center of
people's online lives by delivering personally relevant, meaningful
Internet experiences. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
For more information, visit pressroom.yahoo.com
or the company's blog, Yodel Anecdotal (yodel.yahoo.com).
Yahoo! is the trademark and/or registered trademark of Yahoo! Inc.
All other names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
ADDENDUM: BACKGROUND ABOUT YAHOO! LABS
Yahoo! Labs is a leading industrial research and development organization, focused on the science and technologies of the Internet. Its mission is to advance the state of the art across its areas of focus and create insights, driving the next generation of businesses for Yahoo!. Yahoo! Labs is led by Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan and organized into three areas: research, applied sciences, and academic relations.
Examples of Yahoo! Labs contributions to Yahoo!'s business include:
Revolutionizing Display Advertising
Yahoo! is the world
leader in online display advertising, reporting 19 percent
year-over-year growth in the category for Q2 2010. Fueling this growth
is the science of Computational Advertising, a discipline invented at
Yahoo! Labs that combines information retrieval, machine learning, and
microeconomics to optimize the best ads for Yahoo! to display on each
page it serves.
An enhancement to Yahoo!'s ad-serving platform earlier this year, Computational Advertising was developed and deployed by Yahoo! Labs in partnership with product and engineering teams, improving the accuracy of ad placements and inventory-supply forecasts by a factor of three and optimizing about 20 billion ads a day -- making sure the most relevant ads are served to the right audience at the right time.
Personalization at Massive, Global Scale
Every five minutes,
Yahoo! serves around 32,000 customized variations of the Today Module on
its homepage. This deep personalization is delivered by Yahoo!'s content
optimization technology, which was developed in Yahoo! Labs. The new
technology has proven to be a powerful driver of user engagement, a key
metric of Yahoo!'s ability to deepen its relationship with its audience
of more than 600 million visitors, as click-through rates on Today
Module stories have increased 160 percent to date.
Breakthrough Innovations in Search
Yahoo! Labs has helped
power numerous Yahoo! innovations in search, including:
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SOURCE: Yahoo! Inc.
OutCast Communications
Melika Mizany, 1-415-345-4779
melika@outcastpr.com
or
Yahoo! Global Communications
Denis Roy, 1-408-349-2570
denisroy@yahoo-inc.com
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