Yahoo! Labs"Yahoo Labs"
/ref> served as

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

's research arm, aiming to develop research in technologies to be used within the company. Yahoo! Labs included approximately 200 research scientists and engineers. Yahoo! Labs was headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA; it had three additional locations worldwide:

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York New York may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * ...

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, and

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. Yahoo! Labs

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was closed in early 2015. Yahoo! announced that Yahoo! Labs was being replaced with Yahoo! Research on February 17, 2016.

History

In July 2005, Usama Fayyad (Yahoo!’s Chief Data Officer), Prabhakar Raghavan, Andrew Tomkins, Kevin Lang and other employees who were working for the former "Yahoo! Research Labs" organization formed the new research team. Raghavan was named as Head of Yahoo! Research.

Ronald J. Brachman Ronald Jay "Ron" Brachman (born 1949) is the director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of Yahoo! and head of Yahoo! Labs (Now Yahoo! Research). Prior to that, he was the Associate H ...

, having finished a term as office director at the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

, joined as the head of worldwide research operations in early September. The team was soon joined by Andrei Broder and

Ricardo Baeza-Yates Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates (born March 21, 1961) is a Chilean computer scientist specializing in algorithms, data structures, information retrieval, web search and responsible AI. He is currently the Director of Research at the Institute for Experien ...

. Yahoo! Labs was formed in 2008 through a proposal by Ronald Brachman and Larry Heck from the "Yahoo! Search and Advertising Sciences Lab". The proposal combined the two labs into a single organization. In 2012, Ron Brachman took over as Head of "Yahoo! Labs" and also became Yahoo's chief scientist.

Groups unrelated to research

''"Yahoo! Labs" also includes two groups unrelated to research:''

Academic Partnerships

''Academic Partnerships'' at Yahoo! Labs built relationships with select academic research institutions and fosters collaborative research by sharing datasets for research, hosting academic visits & talks and funding project grants and merit-based awards. Additionally, they aid Yahoo! with graduate student sourcing and helps inform the company on strategic opportunities and insights from the external research community.

Operations

''Operations'' at Yahoo! Labs is responsible for managing the day-to-day processes and procedures. The Operations team leaded Yahoo! corporate initiatives on behalf of the Labs and tracks progress for Labs' goals. Furthermore, the Operations team is responsible for managing Yahoo! Labs' finances, recruiting efforts, events, and communications.

Research areas

Yahoo! Labs conducted research in various fields, each playing a pivotal role in advancing digital frontiers. Research in advertising science aimed to understand persuasion and audience engagement. Content understanding involves decoding the language of information, while data science extracts valuable insights from the digital realm. Efforts were made to enhance the interpretation of visual content through image and video analysis.. Information Retrieval is a key domain, guiding the navigation through vast seas of data, making it accessible and manageable. Machine learning stands as a cornerstone, empowering computers to dynamically learn and evolve. Metrics and User Engagement serve as essential barometers, measuring success in the dynamic online landscape. Natural Language & Dialogue Understanding strengthens human-machine communication, fostering seamless interaction. Optimization and feedback control fine-tune systems within Yahoo! Labs for peak performance, ensuring efficiency in technological processes. Scalable Systems form a robust foundation, facilitating digital expansion and accommodating growth seamlessly. User Modeling and Personalization techniques were employed to tailor experiences within Yahoo Labs' research spectrum.

Notable accomplishments

* Best Paper award winners at KDD,

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, SocInfo, and CIKM in 2013; SPAA, Hypertext, UbiComp, MobileHCI, and RecSys in 2014; ECIR, ICWSM, and

ICML The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is a leading international academic conference in machine learning. Along with NeurIPS and ICLR, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artificial ...

in 2015 * 96 patents issued to Yahoo! Labs inventors in 2013 and 2014, and 50+ in 2015 *

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(ACM),

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

AAAI The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

, and

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...

(ACL) fellows and distinguished members; past president of AAAI * General and PC chairs at leading conferences * Past and current editors, associate editors, and editors-in-chief of leading scientific journals * Authors and editors of academic and popular press books * Member of the board of directors and treasurer of the

Computing Research Association The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit association of North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia enga ...

(CRA)

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://labs.yahoo.com/ Labs Computer science research organizations Science and technology in the San Francisco Bay Area