The first week of September witnessed the meeting of great minds as Yahoo Academic Relations hosted its first Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Graduate Student Summit at its Sunnyvale campus. The two-day summit brought together winners of the updated KSC program which was launched in January 2009. The KSC web site lists the top challenges facing the Web sciences today, identified by Yahoo scientists. Each year, Yahoo invites graduate students to submit a paper about their current or planned research that is relevant to one of these challenges, and explain why their work would make an impact. A committee composed of senior scientists at Yahoo Labs reviews the papers and selects the winners. In addition to the attending the summit, winners are awarded $5,000 in seed funding and an opportunity to work alongside Yahoo scientists. The summit provided attendees with overviews of each research area in Yahoo Labs, a poster session that enabled each attendee to present their projects, and breakout sessions/workshops to collaborate with Yahoo scientists and other students. Attendees also enjoyed a dinner and awards presentation on the evening of the first day. A major theme that emerged from the summit seemed to be finding a common language across the many diverse disciplines that power the industry in order to solve the challenges facing the Web today. “I was looking at the agenda and waiting for to hear presentations about my area,” said Andrea Grimes, a Ph.D. candidate in the Human Centered Computing program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “But as the talks started I realized that there was something of interest to everyone, regardless of research area.” “It was exciting to hear students from the different research areas talk about the value they found in breaking down assumptions, opening up to other perspectives/methods and learning to communicate about these complex problems during the group discussions,” said Jamie Lockwood, Program Manager of Yahoo Academic Relations. The multi-disciplinary research areas were especially apparent during the poster session. From research in nutritional habits to combat obesity to searching across multiple distributed data collections, to statistical models of user behavior, the session exemplified the broad opportunities and challenges presented by the Internet industry today. “Our goal is to broaden the opportunities for our scientists to engage with students – today’s big thinkers on campus, tomorrow’s leaders in Internet research and product development -- to really help us make industry-leading change on the Web,” said Ken Schmidt, Head of Yahoo Academic Relations. “We also wanted to also foster a sense of community during our summit by giving students a chance to meet their peers and develop relationships that they will carry with them throughout their professional careers.” The breakout sessions resulted in some interesting discussions -- and lots of intense brainstorming. In the Web Information Management session, the group had an energetic discussion about the interaction between scalable extraction of information from the Web, and scalable systems to manage that extracted information. “We sketched out an architecture on the whiteboard and a set of features for each piece, then each group pitched their proposed solution to the other group,” said Brian Cooper, Senior Research Scientist. “While we didn’t solve all of the problems, we convinced ourselves that 1) a general architecture for extracting and managing information was possible, and 2) a variety of interesting research problems sprouted up when we started digging into the details of what that architecture looked like.” Yahoo Academic Relations is looking forward to next year’s program based on the success and high level of interest this year.

More information at:

http://labs.yahoo.com/ksc