The Yahoo Academic Relations team consists of campus relations managers and program managers to create a customized approach to campus engagements. Covering about 30 schools in the U.S. and more than 10 in India, the team works with key contacts on campus to strengthen Yahoo’s relationship with academia and get the most value for Yahoo’s business. We recently caught up with the team’s campus relations managers last month to capture what they do on their visits.

Ken Schmidt is feeling excited after spending the day at the University of California at Irvine. His day consisted of meetings with faculty members, administrative staff, and various department chairs in an effort to identify opportunities for Yahoo to establish or maintain close ties to the school. Part of the day is spent reviewing what has worked in the past and what the schools would like to see in the future. Some of the opportunities are revealed after deep dive discussions with faculty about their research and determining if the research aligns with what Yahoo is doing. For example, during a meeting with Padhraic Smyth, computer science professor, Ken discovered that Padhraic is working on an email initiative that would be of significant interest to the Yahoo mail team. Padhraic’s focus on machine learning and data mining fueled further discussion about the possibility of a visit to Yahoo. As a result, Padhraic was invited to present his new research directions Yahoo’s Santa Clara campus. His talk “Modeling and Predicting Email Usage Patterns over Time” opened up new data sharing and research collaboration opportunities with the Yahoo mail team. This is one example of how CRMs can give Yahoo access to early stage research, allowing its scientists to participate in the direction and application of later discoveries. Padhraic was very pleased with his visit. “My discussions with the mail team made me realize that my work lined up very nicely with the problems and techniques that they were already thinking about and working on,” he said. “To get this feedback is very useful – it means that our ideas for email-related research in academia are relevant in the real world.” “When we go to campuses, we look at every level in the organization and ask ourselves, what is the type of research the faculty is working on, who are their best students, and what is the potential of a collaboration with Yahoo,” said Ken. “We strive to extend our intellectual community to create an even larger research community with our schools.” The Smyth talk is just one example of how significant a CRM’s initial contact can be in creating these communities. Like Ken at UC Irvine, Don McGillen spent a jam-packed day at the University of California, San Diego. The first part of his day consisted of a meeting with Amin Vahdat, Director of the Center for Network Systems (CNS) on campus. Their discussion about Amin’s research resulted in a subsequent visit to Yahoo Labs where Amin gave a talk and met one-on-one with several scientists to discuss research and collaboration opportunities. From these discussions, Academic Relations provided seed funding for a collaborative project by Amin and Yahoo Researcher Khaled Elmeleegy entitled “Allocating Storage Infrastructure to Meet Distributed Application Requirements”. In addition to providing funding, Don coordinated with Elmeleegy and fellow Yahoo Researcher Brian Cooper, as well as with Academic Relations Program Manager Kim Capps-Tanaka to make Yahoo data critical to the project available to the UCSD team. As it often happens with these kinds of initiatives, a trickle-down effect resulted, including visits by two Yahoos: Adam Bechtel from SE&O and Brian Cooper to the UCSD campus to give talks. Because of the value of the work at CNS to Yahoo, Bechtel has offered to fund a summer internship at Yahoo for the UCSD PhD student working under Amin on the project. Following discussions between Amin and Yahoo Researcher Raghu Ramakrishnan during Amin’s visit to Yahoo, Don provided funding to launch a new Yahoo sponsored seminar series at UCSD that focuses on the convergence of distributed systems and database systems. Other developments included a hugely successful first hosting by UCSD of a University Hack event and the establishment and presentation of the inaugural Yahoo Excellence Awards to recognize students for outstanding teaching, research, and/or service to the department. In less than two years, the Yahoo relationship has become, according to Amin, “the most successful corporate engagement the CNS has had to date”. “As CRMs, we take a global view of the company when we go on our visits,” said Don. “There are a significant number of academic disciplines that are relevant and have the potential to provide value and a competitive edge to Yahoo. They extend beyond computer science, and I can easily end up meeting with computer scientists and engineers, sociologists, and cognitive psychologists on the same day,” he added. “It’s what makes the job so challenging and so interesting”. This multi-disciplinary approach to Web sciences is very much a part of Beth Crow’s daily agenda. She visited New York University recently to meet with Sinan Aral, a faculty member in the Information, Operations and Management Sciences department of the NYU Stern School of Business. Faculty from NYU led by Sinan recently completed research using a very large dataset from Yahoo users (their surfing behaviors), Yahoo Instant Messenger, and Yahoo Go. Specifically, he was studying peer influence in a social network as it relates to product adoption. After a discussion with Beth, Sinan agreed to visit Yahoo in May to give a talk and conduct discussions about his research using the Yahoo dataset. Beth is also planning roundtable discussions between Sinan and six different business groups within Yahoo, including mobile, insights, open social, marketing, advertising products, and products. The idea for the discussions emerged when Beth explained Sinan’s work to the leads of these groups. The research that was done by Sinan and his team led them to discover other interesting angles, such as mobile usage behaviors, and how user online behavior was predictive of Yahoo Go adoption. This was appealing to the various groups within Yahoo, and Beth was able to make the connection. “Face to face interactions with our stakeholders on campuses—the faculty, the students, and the administration—are invaluable to ensuring that we extend and advance the goals of Yahoo,” said Beth. “Ultimately, we want to link up faculty with parts of our business, extend the Yahoo brand onto campuses, and build trust with the academic community.” With the myriad of programs and collaborative work currently in progress, it appears that the campus relations team is well on track in its goal to building solid relationships with campuses across the nation.