Usama Fayyad, Chief Data Officer at Yahoo! explains the importance of Yahoo! Research and the work they are doing. Yahoo! believes it has built a world-class team of scientists to develop the knowledge and disciplines that will deliver the next generation of businesses to the company. Due to its great reach, the company is awash in usage data. For practical business purposes the key challenge for Yahoo! Research is taking the 12 terabytes of usage data generated per day and turning it into better search results, better products and better advertising and marketing solutions.

Beneath this very practical business purpose, however, lies a grander mission – inventing the next generation Internet. According to Mr. Fayyad, there is something deficient in the science upon which many elements of the Internet are based. Mr. Fayyad argues that if you ask basic questions about many of the concepts bandied about such as community, personalization, content, search, you find they lack substance. He states there are “no solid definitions, no understanding, no formula for turning them into engineering recipes to do good products.”

The Yahoo! Research team is committed to the pursuit of scientific excellence. They believe their work will not only positively contribute to the economics of Yahoo! and the experiences of the 500 million consumers the company interacts with each month, but will result in changes to the underlying scientific foundation of the Internet and have wide ranging implications on the way engineering decisions are made in the future.