On Tuesday, March 1, Yahoo Labs officially announced the opening of Yahoo Labs Beijing. The Beijing Lab, which will be led by Dr. Zhaohui Zheng. It’s the seventh global Labs location, joining Silicon Valley, New York City, Barcelona, Haifa, Bangalore and Santiago, Chile. Zheng and his team will focus on four core aspects of Internet technology that are central to Yahoo’s business globally: search, advertising, mobile and media. The occasion of the new Yahoo Labs in Beijing was marked by a media event attended by more than 25 media outlets from China, all focused on information technology and the Web. In addition, several honored guests from Beijing’s world-class technical universities were in attendance, representing such prestigious institutions as Tsinghua University (one of Zheng’s alma maters), the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People´s Republic of China, and HP Labs, which has been a collaborative partner of Yahoo Labs in the area of Cloud Computing as a charter member of the Open Cirrus Consortium. Attendees to the event heard from Chen Zhang, head of Yahoo’s Beijing R&D Center, which was founded in June of 2009 and is co-located with the Yahoo Labs Beijing offices. Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s Chief Scientist and Head of Yahoo Labs globally, also provided a keynote address on the main technological and scientific challenges of innovation on the Internet. And Raghavan, Zhang and Zheng participated in a joint lighting ceremony to conclude the event that we captured on film:

Three cheers to the Yahoo Labs Beijing team. Stay tuned to this Web site for updates on the great talent and work the team embarks on in 2011.