Yahoo Honors Future Thought Leaders through Key Scientific Challenges Program

NEWS
Apr 3, 2012

The verdict is in for the Yahoo 2012 Key Scientific Challenges Program. Thirty exceptional PhD students have been selected to receive this prestigious award in its fourth year. Supporting the academic community is a top priority at Yahoo. The Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Program was created to recognize outstanding graduate student researchers who have the greatest potential to make significant contributions and become thought leaders in their research fields. Once again we received an overwhelming number of outstanding applications from universities around the globe and the competition was fierce. Based on our desire to support cutting edge research in scientific areas that will deliver next generation Internet technology to our users, we have selected the following researchers as recipients of our 2012 Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Program award (arranged by challenge area in no particular order): Computational Advertising

  • Sofia Ceppi, Politecnico di Milano
  • Morteza Zadimoghaddam, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Eric Sodomka, Brown University

Microeconomics and Social Systems
  • Abraham Gong, University of Michigan
  • Lauren Rhue, NYU - Stern
  • Irene Eleta, University of Maryland
  • Amit Sharma, Cornell University
  • Nikhil Agarwal, Harvard University
  • Bradley Larsen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Hanzhe Zhang, University of Chicago
  • Nima Haghpanah, Northwestern University

Green Computing
  • Chao Li, University of Florida

Machine Learning & Statistics
  • Zhixiang Xu, Washington University
  • Yoav Artzi, University of Washington
  • Noah Simon, Stanford University
  • Michael Lim, Stanford University
  • Elias Bareinboim, University of California, Los Angeles

Privacy & Security
  • Blase Ur, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Arjun Narayan, University of Pennsylvania
  • Shuang Hao, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Shauvik Roy Choudhary, Georgia Institute of Technology

Search Experiences
  • Chenhao Tan, Cornell University
  • Hongning Wang, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Bahman Bahmani, Stanford University
  • Dmitry Lagun, Emory University

Web Information Management
  • Isabelle Stanton, University of California, Berkeley
  • Chengwei Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Raman Grover, University of California, Irvine
  • Thomas Lin, University of Washington
  • Vicente Ordonez, Stony Brook University

The highlights of each recipient’s award benefits include $5,000 unrestricted seed funding, the opportunity to collaborate directly with distinguished Yahoo scientists, access to select datasets and an exclusive invite to this summer’s Yahoo Graduate Student Summit. We were extremely impressed with the all of the applicants and would like to thank each student and professor who applied to this year's program. Congratulations to the outstanding class of 2012 KSC winners! Please check our KSC Web site for more information on how to apply for next year's program and to keep in touch with us for future research funding and collaboration opportunities.