SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 27, 2010 – Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced the start of its second annual Key Scientific Challenges Program — a thought-provoking competition that encourages top graduate students globally to collaborate with Yahoo and help invent the future of the Internet. The Key Scientific Challenges Program focuses on a variety of scientific issues, from developing algorithms that turn raw information into personally relevant experiences, to discovering insights about online advertising and experimenting with new sociological models for how people engage with the Web. Open to any graduate student enrolled in a PhD program at an accredited institution, the Key Scientific Challenges Program gives award winners a unique opportunity to accelerate their research work. The winners will receive:

• $5,000 in unrestricted seed funding for lab materials, travel to academic conferences, professional society memberships, and other resources to drive their research.
• Exclusive access to selected global-scale Yahoo datasets.
• Personal mentoring and collaboration with Yahoo’s world-class research scientists.
• An invitation to present their work at the Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit, to be held in September 2010 at Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

“Yahoo and the entire online industry face challenges that are increasingly complex and require an interdisciplinary approach to solve,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs. “The Key Scientific Challenges Program provides graduate students an unmatched environment that brings together social scientists, economists, computer scientists, and statisticians to collaborate in an unprecedented way. The students get the benefit of testing their research ideas in the real world, and Yahoo gains new perspectives on the technical problems core to improving the Internet.” Yahoo scientists have created a list of 12 major scientific and technical challenge areas for this year’s program:

• Search Experiences
• Machine Learning
• Data Management
• Information Extraction
• Economics
• Statistics
• Multimedia
• Computational Advertising
• Social Sciences
• Green Computing
• Security
• Privacy

Applications for the 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program must be submitted by midnight PST on March 5, 2010. Award winners will be selected by senior Yahoo research scientists in each category, and announced in spring 2010. Details are available online at labs.yahoo.com/ksc. “Last year we were blown away by the number and quality of the submissions,” said Ron Brachman, vice president, Yahoo Labs. “We are really excited to be able to again support the groundbreaking research taking place at universities around the world, and look forward to continuing to collaborate with these thought leaders and innovators.” Yahoo presented Key Scientific Challenges awards in 2009 to 21 students from 13 institutions: Arizona State University; University of California, Berkeley; Carnegie Mellon University; Columbia University; Emory University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad; University of Maryland; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Northwestern University; Stanford University; and University of Washington. About Yahoo Yahoo attracts hundreds of millions of users every month through its innovative technology and engaging content and services, making it one of the most trafficked Internet destinations and a world-class online media company. Yahoo's vision is to be the center of people's online lives by delivering personally relevant, meaningful Internet experiences. Yahoo is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit pressroom.yahoo.com or the company's blog, Yodel Anecdotal (yodel.yahoo.com). Yahoo is the trademark and/or registered trademark of Yahoo Inc. Yahoo Corporate Communications Denis Roy, Yahoo Inc., (408) 349-2570, denisroy@yahoo-inc.com

More information at:

http://www.labs.yahoo.com/ksc