In late August of this year, twenty-four exceptional PhD students from universities around the world visited Yahoo for the 2011 Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit, a two-day gathering where the annual winners of the popular Yahoo Labs program discuss the cutting edge challenges facing the future of Web sciences. Yahoo Labs’ Key Scientific Challenges Program (KSC) aims to nurture the minds of tomorrow through funding (winners earned $5000) and mentoring from some of Yahoo Labs leading researchers and scientists. This year’s winners, which were announced in April, hailed from universities as close by as Stanford and Berkeley and as far as Bangalore and Israel. Day one of this year’s KSC Summit began with a line-up of highly regarded headline speakers, including Andrei Broder, Yahoo Fellow and Vice President for Computational Advertising, who gave an overview of research at Yahoo. Andrei spoke about computer science in the context of human social systems, outlining the sweet spot at Yahoo where scientists combine tech, social interactions and economics to deeply analyze and measure data across the vast Yahoo network, which Andrei defined as the biggest ‘Webscope’ on the Internet where scientists can test theories and develop models and research. Read more here.