Yahoo! Labs Bangalore is committed to building strong partnerships with the academic community to promote a culture of open collaboration and innovation between industry and academia in India. We are engaged with faculty through research grants, visits and collaborations, with students through Ph.D. coop programs, summer internships and hacking competitions and with the professional community through conference sponsorships and tech talks.
At Yahoo! Labs Bangalore, we support and collaborate with university faculty to tackle some of the toughest problems on the Web. We offer
- Collaboration agreements and unrestricted research grants for faculty at leading institutes in India
- Equipment donations to Indian universities
We welcome faculty to spend time with us in our Labs in Bangalore either as scientific consultants for a short duration, such as two or three months during the summer, or as part of a sabbatical to work with our world-class scientists, state-of-the-art computing facilities, and real-world data.
Yahoo! India actively sponsors academic and technical
conferences held in the India. In the past, we have been sponsors for
conferences such as International Conference on Management of Data (COMAD), International
Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC), InfoVision, and others.
We provide a reference library of interesting and scientifically useful web search data sets for research (non-commercial) use by academics and other scientists. All data sets will be vetted to conform to strict controls on privacy. Data will be shared only for academic use by professors who agree to and sign a data sharing agreement form. Contact research-data-requests@yahoo-inc.com for details.
We invite students to spend time with us over the summer. Our internships provide students with a unique opportunity to work on cutting-edge research problems with some of the well-known scientists in Yahoo! Labs in Bangalore. The program is open to students at all levels, but preferably in post-graduate (M.Tech, M.S. and Ph.D.) programs at leading institutes from around the world. The typical duration of summer internships is 10-12 weeks. See Career Opportunities for more details and write to yahoo-labs-blr@yahoo-inc.com if you are interested.
We are planning to launch Yahoo! Ph.D. Coop programs at major institutes in India. As part of the program, Yahoo! employees will be able to work full-time studying and doing research for a Ph.D. degree under the guidance of institute faculty on topics of mutual interest.
Yahoo! launched a new initiative to encourage Ph.D. students to look at new and emerging research topics in the Internet and Web world. It is a competition to propose Key Scientific Challenges in those topics. The selected award recipients will receive an unrestricted research seed funding. The program is open to Ph.D. students world-wide, including India. See Key Scientific Challenges for more details about the topics, application procedure, criteria, FAQ, etc.
In January and February of 2009, we collaborated with leading faculty and students at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay to host Yahoo! University Hack Days (HackU). Hack U is designed to foster a culture of innovative thinking in students and encourage them to "hack" new web apps and tools.
We plan to organize such events in a few other major technical institutes in India and hold them annually.
Scientists, engineers, and technical experts from Yahoo! Labs in Bangalore regularly give talks and seminars at Indian Institutes and Engineering Colleges on the research problems they are working on, the technical challenges they face, and the latest technologies they are developing at Yahoo!.
Yahoo! Big Thinkers India is a series of quarterly lectures that bring together academia, scientists in the industry and the corporate world. The speakers are acclaimed experts from Yahoo! sharing their perspective of the constantly changing world of technology, online products & communities, and the internet space in general.
Go to Big Thinkers to get more details and the list of speakers lined up for this year.