Earlier this year in late August twenty-four exceptional PhD students from universities around the world visited Yahoo! for the 2011 Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit, a two day gathering where the annual winners of the popular Yahoo! Labs program discuss the cutting edge challenges facing the future of Web sciences. Yahoo! Labs’ Key Scientific Challenges Program (KSC) aims to nurture the minds of tomorrow through funding (winners earned $5000) and mentoring from some of Yahoo! Labs leading researchers and scientists. This year’s winners, which were announced in April, hailed from universities as close by as Stanford and Berkeley and as far as Bangalore and Israel.

Day one of this year’s KSC Summit began with a line-up of highly regarded headline speakers, including Andrei Broder, Yahoo! Fellow and Vice President for Computational Advertising, who gave an overview of research at Yahoo!.  Andrei spoke about computer science in the context of human social systems, outlining the sweet spot at Yahoo! where scientists combine tech, social interactions and economics to deeply analyze and measure data across the vast Yahoo! network, which Andrei defined as the biggest ‘Webscope’ on the Internet where scientists can test theories and develop models and research.

David Chaiken, Yahoo!’s Chief Architect, spoke about Yahoo!’s unique culture and how the company designs its technology specifically to enable close collaboration between product, engineering and science teams so that research has a direct impact on Yahoo!’s business day in and day out. He explained how Yahoo! Labs creates personalization algorithms for Yahoo!’s homepage, for example, which is a project we blogged about here on Yodel during Yahoo! Labs’ Science Week.

This is just a taste of the topics discussed in a room full of leading thinkers, with an exciting mix of ambition and experience. Justin Rao, a Research Scientist at Yahoo! who most recently appeared in a Forbes panel with our Head of Yahoo! Labs, Prabhakar Ragavan, spoke about his latest work on the intricacies of measuring advertising effectiveness. And Daniel Goldstein, also a Research Scientist at Yahoo!, presented on how you can predict information diffusion based on interactions across social networks, questioning the traditional notion of “viral” content.

Overall, the 2011 Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit was an engaging and productive event. You can learn more about all of this year’s winners here. All of them have great research in the pipeline, so watch out for these names as you read about future breakthroughs in Web science – you heard about them here first.