Prabhakar Raghavan talks to Wired UK about the growth and innovation of Yahoo! Labs and how our scientists support Yahoo!'s Product Strategy.

Yahoo! Labs kicked off 2012 with a feature story on Wired UK this week: an interview with Chief Strategy Officer, Executive Vice President and Head of Yahoo! Labs Prabhakar Raghavan.

The article focuses on key aspects of the evolution of Yahoo! Labs and the work our scientists and researchers do to support our Product Strategy, including personalization/ C.O.R.E. and some recent product launches (IntoNow, Livestand, Yahoo! Activity). The article also includes the announcement of the recent EU roll-out of Yahoo! Activity.

Key quotes from the article include:

• ‘Raghavan says that the key to [Yahoo! Labs’] success has been bringing together machine and human intelligence, and specifically, gathering minds from a wide range of disciplines.’
• ‘Personalisation is key and Yahoo! Labs is utilising technology that it has long used for its homepage to power the new tablet tools. Three years ago, it created the Content Optimisation and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.), which uses computer algorithms and human expertise to pick, for example, the news stories that you will see when you visit the Yahoo! homepage.’
• ‘But what of the future for Yahoo! Labs? Well, more personalisation and more social interaction. Just launched in the UK is Yahoo! Activity, which allows people to share the news that they are reading using Facebook.’
• ‘But the biggest selling point is the variety that his staff enjoy. He says: 'I feel fortunate to work at Yahoo! Labs because what we do is such a young and nascent area. Its early growth is certainly going to outlast my career. A lot of the work comes back to how users are going to behave; and there's also new forms of interaction appearing all of the time. The tablet, for example, has taken us by storm in the last three years--bringing out new human dynamics in ways that we hadn't anticipated.' And with new devices constantly being developed, and more users coming online, this isn't going to change.’

Hear more from Prabhakar and read the full article from Wired here.