Yahoo was in San Diego at the 17th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge and Discovery (KDD-2011), an international event for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government. From August 21 to 24, members from academia and industry gather to share ideas, research results, and experiences in the areas of large data, knowledge discovery, data mining, and predictive analytics and their impact on healthcare, media, financial markets, advertising, social media, and more. This year, Yahoo's unrivaled presence included seventeen refereed papers, two tutorials, and the KDD Cup. The KDD cup competition centered on Yahoo Music, which has amassed billions of user ratings for a variety of musical pieces. The competition challenged scientists to work with the raw ratings that encode information on how songs are grouped, which hidden patterns link various albums, which artists complement each other, and which songs users would like to listen to. Winners were announced during Sunday night's opening reception. And the winners are:

• National Taiwan University: First place in both Track 1 and Track 2
• Commendo: Second place in Track 1 and third place in Track 2
• The Art of Lemon: Second place in Track 2
• InnerPeace: Third place in Track 1

The winners were presented with cash prizes at the opening ceremony. Prominent themes at the conference included Web user modeling, text mining, social networks, security, classification, scalability, and data mining for healthcare. For more information on the conference, click here.