Yahoo at WWW2011

NEWS
Apr 14, 2011

Hundreds of attendees from all over the world gathered in Hyderabad, India, the week of March 29 to talk about the future of the Web at the 20th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2011). Representatives included a combination of industry and academic experts, highlighted by prominent attendance from Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Infosys. Yahoo was a gold sponsor this year with a prominent presence and strong technical program, including 21 refereed papers and 10 refereed posters. Several Yahoo Labs scientists held positions on the organizing committee, including program co-chair Ravi Kumar and panels co-chair Rajeev Rastogi. Several workshops and tutorials were also held by Yahoo Labs scientists, and demos on recent projects were given at the Yahoo booth, drawing an immense amount of attention from attendees. Keynote speakers included former president of India Abdul Kalam, who pitched for a multilingual, mobile Web in his talk and pushed for societal transformations that can happen only when a larger part of the planet population will be connected and online. Additional keynotes were given by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and UC Berkeley Professor Christos Papadimitriou. Berners-Lee talked about how the Internet should remain neutral so that the Web can truly support democracy and science. He also shared his disdain for mobile applications – that Web applications should rule over mobile apps so that everything remains on the Web and can be linked together. Papadimitriou’s talk was about the rising of a new discipline, “algorithmic economics,” and how this is impacting the way people think, experience and design the Web. Papadimitriou depicted a new way of addressing research questions involving the Web, where end users are a key part of the systems, algorithms and applications we create and deploy. Notable themes included cloud computing, which heavily revolved around two large pivotal aspects: social and search. Networks are still popular in the community, and twitter enjoyed a lot of attention and served as a topic in several refereed papers. Attendees enjoyed a scavenger hunt challenge at the Yahoo booth, which required participants to collect a number of items and information. Winners enjoyed either an iPod nano or a signed copy of “Logicomix,” Christos Papadimitriou’s NY Times best-selling book. You can also read about Yahoo’s participation at WWW2011 here.