This week a host of Yahoo!’s scientists and researchers, along with their colleagues from academic institutions and other technology companies across the world, converged on Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina for WWW2010. WWW (World Wide Web conference) is an annual event held in late April or early May that focuses on the evolution of the Web, the standardization of Web technologies, and its impact on society and culture. And since 1999 at WWW Toronto, Yahoo!’s big thinkers have been vocal and influential participants in the discussion.

At last year’s conference held in Madrid, Spain, Yahoo! presented 14 refereed papers and Ricardo Baeza-Yates, head of Yahoo! Labs Barcelona, gave a keynote on mining Web 2.0 data for Search. This year, Yahoo! raised the stakes again, with 21 papers accepted at the 2010 event (out of a total of 105 accepted papers for the entire event), as well as a variety of posters, demos and panels, including a featured discussion on the future of Search and the core technologies of the Web.

As usual, the Yahoo! booth at the conference attracted a lot of interest from attendees. Some of the highlights include demonstrations we are giving of some experimental projects to gather data and test our theories. Because not everyone can attend WWW, we thought it would be fun to give everyone a quick look-in from the booth with some short clips of our scientists and their demos.

First up, is Predictalot, a combinatorial prediction market game we debuted to test the “wisdom of the crowds” during March Madness and that will be making a global return to prominence for World Cup 2010 in South Africa:

Next up is Statler, a tool for developing a model of engagement for how users interact with content over time. In this case, Statler is analyzing public Twitter feeds around major events, like the 2008 Presidential debates and Barack Obama’s inauguration. The goal of Statler and the associated research is to be able to predict which items are likely to resonate over time, rather than spike in popularity before quickly fading away.

Our next demo, Ranking Entity Facets, is a technical name for a technology we’ve deployed at Yahoo! Search to make it easier for people to explore all kinds of people, movies, locations and other “entities” related to what they’re searching for at any given time. What makes this capability exciting is that it relies on the science and technology powering Yahoo!’s Web of Things platform where Yahoo! is able to mine all kinds of content and data sources to synthesize a Web page for you with all the information you need on a topic, rather than just a list of Web links.

And then there is Wrapper Induction, developed by our data mining group in Labs, which is all about extracting valuable information from Web pages.

For a full recap of all the events at WWW2010 this week, make sure to check out the Yahoo! Labs Web site and follow us on Twitter @YahooLabs. You can also see all Tweets related to WWW2010 at #WWW2010 and follow our Flickr stream.

Lin Koh
Yahoo! Labs

P.S. If you want to check out what fun is, here’s a cryptogram we shared with folks at WWW as part of a booth contest. Perhaps you’d like to take a crack at solving it too.