While some of our researchers are out winning distinguished awards (congrats again Judd!), other members of the Yahoo! Labs team are down south in San Diego this week at the annual KDD conference, an international event for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.  The conference, running August 21-24 is a forum to share ideas, research results and experiences in the areas of Big Data, Knowledge Discovery, Data Mining, Predictive Analytics and their impact on healthcare, media, financial markets, advertising, social media and more.

Yahoo!’s impact at the event is huge.  We use knowledge discovery and data mining every day to make the Yahoo! experience deeply personal and relevant for our users and advertisers alike. For example, as we described earlier this month, we use these principles to personalize the Yahoo! homepage with 45,000 different variations of our “Today Module” every five minutes. If you’re interested in learning more about why data is so important to Yahoo!, check out this video interview with some of our leading scientists that recently appeared on Forbes.com too.

We have some of our best researchers and top talent joining scientists from Stanford, Rutgers and Princeton, as well as the research labs of other leaders in the field, to share insight and case studies around such things as social media analytics, Internet ad systems, behavioral analytics and Hadoop.

We have Yahoo! researchers flying in from across the globe, presenting a total of seventeen papers, two tutorials, and of course, the KDD Cup!

This year’s KDD cup competition centered on Yahoo! Music, which has amassed billions of user ratings for a variety of musical pieces.  The competition challenged scientists to work with the raw ratings that encode information on how songs are grouped, which hidden patterns link various albums, which artists complement each other, and which songs users would like to listen to. Check out the details here: external KDD Cup Website.

Here’s a photo of Here’s a photo of one of the winning teams (Team Commendo) claiming their prize on Sunday.

We’re proud to have such a great team of professionals representing Yahoo! and driving scientific leadership across the industry.