Yahoo Labs

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, having finished a term as office director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), joined as the head of worldwide research operations in early September. The team was soon joined by Andrei Broder and Ricardo Baeza-Yates. 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 ==

• Advertising science • Content understanding • Data science • Image and video understanding • Information retrieval • Machine learning • Metrics and user engagement • Natural language and dialogue understanding • Optimization and feedback control • Scalable systems • User modeling and personalization == Notable accomplishments ==

• Best Paper award winners at KDD, UIST, SocInfo, and CIKM in 2013; SPAA, Hypertext, UbiComp, MobileHCI, and RecSys in 2014; ECIR, ICWSM, and ICML in 2015 • 96 patents issued to Yahoo! Labs inventors in 2013 and 2014, and 50+ in 2015 • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE, AAAI, and Association for Computational Linguistics (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 (CRA) == References ==