It has been a stellar year at Yahoo! Labs, and before 2010 arrives, we want to share an overview of the great science that our colleagues have published in 2009. The Internet is changing as rapidly as ever - from what's possible technologically to how people are interacting with technology and each other, and it's part of Yahoo! Labs' mission to help Yahoo! and the world understand that evolution. On that front, we made major progress during these past 12 months, and were thrilled that our work was recognized with seven Best Paper awards at top conferences in our industry, including:

• "Integration of News Content Into Web Results" by Fernando Diaz at Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)
• The work Yehuda Koren described in his paper, "Collaborative Filtering with Temporal Dynamics," was a crucial contribution to his team. It won the Netflix prize well as the Best Paper award at the 15^th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
• "Sources of Evidence for Vertical Selection," by Jaime Arguello (a Yahoo! intern from Carnegie Mellon University), Fernando Diaz (Yahoo! Labs), Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon University), and Jean-Francois Crespo (Yahoo! Labs) at the 32^nd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR)
• "Generating Example Data for Dataflow Programs," by Chris Olston, Shubham Chopra, and Utkarsh Srivastava at ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference (SIGMOD)
• "From 'dango' to 'japanese cakes': Query Reformulation Models and Patterns," by Francesco Bonchi and Carlos Castillo at the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence
• "On the Feasibility of Multi-Site Web Search Engines," by Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Aris Gionis, Flavio Junqueira, Vassilis Plachouras, and Luca Telloli at the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
• "Explore/Exploit Schemes for Web Content Optimization," by Deepak Agarwal, Bee-Chung Chen and Pradheep Elango at IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)

 
Yahoo! Labs also led the technical program at WSDM, ending up with a quarter of the total accepted papers at the event. And at the 18^th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in April 2009, Yahoo! Labs secured the most accepted papers from a single organization. Two of those papers — "Visual Diversification of Image Search Results," by Reinier H. van Leuken (Universiteit Utrecht), Lluis Garcia (Yahoo! Labs), Ximena Olivares (Unversitat Pompeu Fabra), and Roelof van Zwol (Yahoo! Labs); and "Social Search in ‘Small-World' Experiments," by Sharad Goel, Roby Muhamad (Columbia University), and Duncan Watts — were nominated for the conference's Best Paper award.

In addition, at SIGMOD, Bee-Chung Chen and Ashwin Machanavajjhala also earned Best Dissertation runner-up awards for their work on "Cube-Space Data Mining" and "Defining and Enforcing Privacy in Data Sharing," respectively. 

Finally, wrapping up the year at CIKM, Yahoo! Labs topped 2008's accomplishments and, in addition to the Best Paper award, received awards for Best Student Paper and runner-up Student Paper, and earned a record of 30 accepted papers. The awards for Best Student Paper and runner-up Student Paper went to Michalis Potamias, Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo, and Aris Gionis for "Fast Shortest Path Distance Estimation in Large Networks;" and Matthijs van Leeuwen, Francesco Bonchi, Arno Siebes, and Borkur Sigurbjornsson for "Compressing Tags to Find Interesting Media Groups." 

Though the year isn't quite over yet, we at Yahoo! Labs are proud of our colleagues' accomplishments, and we're gearing up for what lies ahead in 2010. 

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs