mobile <p>In the summer of 2005, a small group of leaders from some of the world’s most prominent industrial research institutions were afforded the privilege of starting something new at Yahoo–senior management had decided that the company was mature enough and the competitive landscape was challenging enough that Yahoo’s products needed to be more informed by, if not driven by, advanced scientific thinking and cutting-edge technology. And Yahoo Labs was born.</p>
<p>Yahoo Labs started out as Yahoo Research. In July of 2005, recruited by Usama Fayyad (formerly of Microsoft Research), who was Yahoo’s Chief Data Officer, Prabhakar Raghavan and Andrew Tomkins (both formerly of IBM Research) joined a few Yahoo employees (Kevin Lang among them) who were with Yahoo working for the erstwhile “Yahoo Research Labs” organization, and formed the brand new research team. Prabhakar was named as Head of Yahoo Research. Ron Brachman, just finishing a term as office director at DARPA and a long career at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs, joined as the head of worldwide research operations in early September. The pioneering team was soon joined by a key set of additional leaders, including Andrei Broder and Ricardo Baeza-Yates. With that outstanding foundation, the group was able to build an incredible talent base of top scientists and research engineers in a remarkably short time.</p>
<p>In 2008 Yahoo Research merged with the Search and Advertising Applied Science organization and came to be known by its modern name, Yahoo Labs. In 2012, Ron Brachman took over as Head of Yahoo Labs and also became Yahoo’s chief scientist.</p>
<p>Over the years, the Labs became more and more essential to Yahoo’s products while maintaining a core scientific identity. The balance of the closeness of the team’s partnerships with Yahoo’s product and engineering groups, and the excellence of the external academic work achieved, is unparalleled in the industry. The research scientists and engineers at Yahoo Labs contribute critical insights to Yahoo’s most important products; in many cases teams are actually fully embedded in the workspaces of their product partners. All the while the Labs continues to maintain extraordinary standards of technical excellence through rigorous interviews with candidates, top-notch publications in the best venues, and senior leadership positions in various scientific fields.</p>