It is our great pleasure to announce the winners of the Yahoo ACE (Academic Career Enhancement) Awards for the 2012-13 academic year. The Ace Awards were started last year and are designed to enable Yahoo Labs scientists and engineers to establish relationships with top young faculty members working in Yahoo-relevant academic areas early in their careers. Under the ACE Program, these future superstars are nominated by Labs Scientists and Campus Relationship Managers from Academic Relations, who must provide justification to enable selection of awardees from the candidate pool. Each winner is presented with an unrestricted gift in the amount of $10,000 which may be used in any way to help the new faculty members get their research and education careers off to a fast start. The program was highly successful and very well-received last year, and the inaugural awardees put the award money to a variety of uses – from purchasing research-related hardware and software, to hiring students to work on research projects. The goals of the Yahoo ACE program are to:

• Establish relationships with promising young faculty members early in their careers
• Ensure they are well aware of the robust research program pursued within Yahoo Labs
• Provide early opportunities for them to establish active collaborations with Yahoo scientists and engineers
• Ensure their students are well aware of outstanding internship and job opportunities offered by Yahoo

The winners are announced in no particular order below:

• Professor Aaron Roth from the University of Pennsylvania
• Professor Michael Bernstein from Stanford University
• Professor Barnabas Poczos from Carnegie Mellon University
• Professor Nate Foster from Cornell University
• Professor Sylvia Ratnasamy from UC Berkeley

On behalf of all of us at Yahoo Labs, we wish the award recipients the best of luck in their careers and we look forward to working with them and their students in the future!