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.

Yahoo!’s scientific leadership was clearly evident at WWW2011 – Yahoo! Labs presented 26 papers and posters and participated in several signature discussions around crowdsourcing, social media and the digital divide. Yahoo! scientists also provided demos on their latest projects, drawing a great deal of interest and attention from attendees.

You may have seen some of Yahoo! Labs’ thought provoking research in the news this week, whether it was focused on “Who Talks to Whom on Twitter” or if it’s possible to detect the credibility of Tweets.

For those who couldn’t make it to WWW2011, we checked in with Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Labs, from the event:
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For a full recap of all the activities from this week’s WWW2011, check out the Yahoo! Labs Web site and follow us on Twitter @YahooLabs. You can also see Tweets related to WWW2011 at #WWW2011.

As Yahoo! has grown, so has the company’s infrastructure needs. As Chief Architect, Raymie led transformative efforts to rewire Yahoo!, moving from a set of vertical silos to a horizontal platform infrastructure. As this strong foundation is laid, we’re ready to leverage the world’s most diverse collection of content to create innovative, more personalized consumer and advertiser experiences around the globe.

And as our business has expanded in scale and complexity, Raymie has provided technical insight and direction throughout the engineering organization. With his leadership, technical Yahoo’s have focused on core challenges like creating a stable, agile development environment, extracting value from masses of unstructured data, developing scalable global experiences, and architecting a cloud to serve as the foundation for every click across our network.

As CTO, Raymie reports to our Chief Products Officer, Blake Irving and will drive technology roadmaps in partnership with both Chief Scientist Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversees science and research at Yahoo!, and David Dibble, who leads Service Engineering and Operations.

Over the past couple of years, Prabhakar has led and helped build our Yahoo! Research organization to examine some of the most complex problems facing the Internet. His extensive expertise in search algorithms (he literally wrote the book on it), understanding the fundamental structure of the Web, and the social phenomena emerging from it, continues to play an important role as we work to make Yahoo! the starting point on the Web. Yahoo! Research is charged with a simple but fundamentally powerful vision: “Invent the new sciences underlying the Internet and the new ineteractive media.”

Nothing is more inspiring to me than a collection of brilliant minds. Over the past four years, our research team has grown from one small lab into a world-class research organization with seven locations in four countries (and we’re not stopping there). Under Prabhakar’s leadership, Yahoo! Research is focused on creating and exploring groundbreaking technologies that will improve our users’ online experience, from understanding communities and the new economics of the Web to the new emerging science of computational advertising, and economics and social systems to advanced search technologies.

Thanks for making us proud, Prabhakar.

Usama Fayyad
Chief Data Officer & EVP of Research & Strategic Data Solutions

Photo from sigir2007.