The Yahoo Faculty Research and Engagement Program (FREP) is designed to produce the highest quality scientific collaborations and outcomes by engaging with faculty members working in areas of mutual interest. Through this program, academics across the globe collaborate with Yahoo research scientists via visits to Yahoo, access to our data and funds for their research. We’re committed to forging strong alliances with top faculty by collaborating on cutting edge research to advance Web Science. These collaborations will solve shared problems with measurable outcomes such as joint papers, advances in algorithm design and experimental results. FREP supports all areas of Yahoo Labs research and all Yahoo Labs office locations. Our Faculty Research and Engagement Program was organically born from existing relationships our research scientists held with top academics. Given its initial success we’ve maintained the program’s structure of leveraging existing relationships and connections. As a result we do not hold open calls for proposals. To learn more about our focus areas, please refer to the appropriate sections within this Web site listed on our home page. We’re excited to announce the 2011 Faculty Research and Engagement Program recipients. Gifts were awarded to the following academics (listed by research area in no particular order). Economics and Social Systems

• Steve Benford, University of Nottingham
• Peter Stone, UT Austin
• Mor Naaman, Rutgers
• Kenneth C. Wilbur, Duke
• Keisuke Hirano, University of Arizona
• Iwan Barankay, University of Pennsylvania
• Hal Ersner-Hershfield, NYU
• Benjamin Edelman, Harvard HBS

Web Information Management

• Stefan Savage, UCSD
• Rainer Lienhart, University of Augsburg
• Amol Deshpande, University of Maryland
• Lise Getoor, University of Maryland
• Qiaozhu Mei, University of Michigan
• Johannes Gehrke, Cornell
• Jian Guo, Harvard
• Gerome Miklau, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• Daniel Kifer, Penn State
• Shivnath Babu, Duke

Search Science

• Alex Yates, Temple
• Peter M. Todd, Stanford
• Cecilia Mascolo, Cambridge
• Eric Nyberg, CMU
• Yan Liu, USC
• Daniel Jurafsky, Stanford

Computational Advertising, Machine Learning and Search & Web Mining

• Eli Upfal, Brown
• Tony Jebara, Columbia
• Julia Hirschberg, Columbia
• Jon Kleinberg, Cornell
• Lillian Lee, Cornell
• Mike West, Duke
• Eugene Agichtein, Emory
• Michael Mitzenmacher, Harvard
• Ashish Goel, Stanford
• Hal Duame III, University of Maryland
• Fabrizio Silvestri, Inf. Sci. and Tech. Inst

Advertising Sciences

• Huan Liu, ASU
• Evimaria Terzi, Boston University
• Joy Ying Zhang, CMU
• Kristin Fridgeirsdottir, London Business School
• Rong Jin, Michigan State
• Yi Zhang, UCSC
• Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois at Chicago

Bangalore Labs

• Dipti Misra Sharma, IIIT Hyderabad
• Pushpak Bhattcharyya, IIT Bombay
• Soumen Chakrabarti, IIT Bombay
• Arnab Bhattacharya, IIT Kanpur
• Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, IIS
• Shirish Shevade, IISc
• S. Sudarshan, IIT Bombay

Barcelona Labs

• Robert Isele, Freie Universitat Berlin
• Oren Kurland, Technion
• Benjamin Bustos, University of Chile
• Pascal Felber, University of Neuchatel
• Frank van Harmelen, Vrije University

Beijing Labs

• Hongyuan Zha, Georgia Tech

The highlights of each recipient’s gift include the opportunity to collaborate directly with distinguished Yahoo scientists, access to Yahoo data and an opportunity to visit Yahoo Labs. Yahoo Labs Senior Research Scientist, Evgeniy Gabrilovich says of his experience with the Faculty Research and Engagement Program, “Over the last year, I had a very productive collaboration with Eugene Agichtein from Emory University. During that time, we co-authored 3 conference papers, jointly developed a tutorial on using collaboratively generated content for information retrieval and made significant progress towards our forthcoming book on collaboratively generated content. Eugene will visit us for a couple of days in early August, when he will give a talk on his current research, and will have an opportunity to meet with our scientists to discuss additional directions for future collaboration. All of these things were made possible by FREP and I am thrilled with the outcome of this partnership” We were extremely impressed with all of the submissions and would like to thank each professor who applied. Congratulations to the recipients of the Yahoo 2011 Faculty Research and Engagement Program! If you have questions about the Faculty Research and Engagement Program please contact Kim Capps.