Big Thinkers India Series - Usama Fayyad

Usama Fayyad, Yahoo!'s Chief Data Officer and Executive vice President of Research & Strategic Data Solutions, presented "Inventing the New Sciences of the Internet: Towards Understanding the New Interactive Media" during the Big Thinkers India Series on May 23, 2008.

Abstract
As the Internet continues to change the way we live, find information, communicate, and do business, it has also been taking on a dramatically increasing role in marketing and advertising. Unlike any prior mass medium, the Internet is a unique medium when it comes to interactivity and offers ability to target and program messaging at the individual level. Coupled with its uniqueness in the richness of the data that is available for measurability, in the variety of ways to utilize the data, and in the great dependence of effective marketing on applications that are heavily data-driven, makes the data analysis, modeling an essential mission-critical part of running the on-line business. However, because of its novelty and the scale of data sets involved, few companies have figured out how to properly make use of this data. Furthermore, the most basic fundamental concepts underpinning many of the applications that are becoming popular are based on a shallow understanding of what they are and how they can be understood. The larger issues surrounding the Internet as a technology that is ubiquitous in our lives, yet little is understood at the scientific level, is creating a fundamental set of fundamental challenges in defining and understanding many of the basics of the Internet: Community Systems, Search and Information Navigation, Computational Advertising, and the new Microeconomics of the Web. This talk provides an overview of the new Yahoo! Research organization and its aims: inventing the new sciences underlying what we do on the Internet, focusing on areas that have received little attention in the traditional academic circles and industrial research labs. Some illustrative examples will be reviewed to make the ultimate goals more concrete. Particular focus will be provided around data-driven capabilities and how data mining plays a unique role in driving many initiatives.

The full video presentation can be found at Yahoo! India Big Thinkers Series.