Torrential rainfall and 45-mile per hour winds did nothing to deter a passionate group of Yahoos from making their mark on the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) campus. This group of Yahoos had a storm of their own planned and Mother Nature was not going to stop it. Team members from Academic Relations, University Recruiting, Engineering and the local Champaign office worked together to plan an impressive four days of Yahoo-sponsored events at UIUC. The fun began on Tuesday, October 18th when the Yahoo Champaign Office hosted their first open house. Approximately 30 computer science and engineering students took the shuttle bus from the UIUC computer science building over to the Yahoo office in Research Park where they were able to spend the evening mingling with engineers and learning about Hadoop and other technologies through ongoing tech talks. Of course, no Yahoo event is complete without purple prizes so students also played Yahoo trivia and minute-to-win-it games where they won footballs, frisbees, water bottles, and the much-coveted Yahoo yodel button. The evening wound down with a catered Italian dinner and an opportunity for students to hear directly from employees about what it’s like to work at Yahoo Champaign. Attendees commented at the end of the evening that it was a “very cool event” and that they “had not realized that such high-tech work was happening here in Champaign”. The next day, Yahoo was back on campus in a big way – literally. Wednesday, October 19th saw the delivery of 60 servers to UIUC Professor Dan Roth via our 56ft semi-truck, which lit up the gloomy and wet UIUC quad. This charitable deed was the work of Yahoo Campus Relationship Manager, Don McGillen, and Yahoo Datacenter Operations Manager, Karina Eichman, who created the YahooSTAR (Yahoo Servers to Academic Researchers) program in which the company’s old servers are now recycled and donated to academic institutions to be used for academic research. “We develop machine learning based models that rely on vast amounts of text and learn how to semantically parse the text, identify and categorize entities and important concepts in the text, and consequently, analyze events, opinions and trends,” said YahooSTAR recipient and Professor Dan Roth. “The new cluster will allow us to train our models and analyze a lot more text, and learn larger and better models. In particular, some of our models are being used broadly by the research community. For example, thousands of users use our demos to analyze text at deeper levels, from part-of-speech tagging, to named entity recognitions, and semantic parsing. In addition to allowing us to develop better models the new YahooSTAR cluster will also allow us to provide this service to the research community more reliably“. The official start of UIUC Hack U took place later Wednesday evening. On Thursday afternoon, all eyes were on Yahoo again when our VP of Engineering for User Data and Analytics Xuhui Shao gave a tech talk in front of 40 students about the technology behind Yahoo’s Right Media advertising exchange platform. The UIUC computer science students were intrigued to hear how Yahoo’s technologies manage such large amounts of data. Learn more about Yahoo Academic Relations and Yahoo University Recruiting or follow them on Twitter and Facebook.