Yahoo! launches new lab in Bangalore
By Christo Jacob   |   Wednesday, 05 March 2008, 01:35 IST
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Bangalore: As a premium step towards moving beyond the current paradigm, Internet giant Yahoo! India announced the expansion of its India R&D operations with the launch of Yahoo! Labs - Bangalore. Dr. Rajeev Rastogi who is appointed as the Vice President and head of the new lab will steer the research to focus on search and information retrieval and large-scale computational linguistics. While the current Yahoo! India R&D is focused on new products and engineering, the focus of the new lab will be on long-term research, said Rastogi. Yahoo India having 10 percent work force in India, the labs look forward to come up with innovative solutions from six to two years from now. Yahoo! Labs - Bangalore will be a center of excellence for next generation search and advertising technologies, focused on making the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers. "Yahoo! Labs - Bangalore intends to build its world-class team, which is focused on delivering the most valuable insights and leading edge technologies to delight all of our customers worldwide," said Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP and Head of Yahoo! Research. "Rajeev's background and expertise in product development, as well as his deep experience in research will strengthen our leadership in international research and technology and leverage knowledge from across the region." "As every day there are lot of user generated content being browsed and to find the key words, we need to move beyond the current paradigm and it needs lot of research," says Rastogi. At this point, Rastogi find the challenge in finding the appropriate talent for the key positions in the labs. "At this time we are looking out for more Indian techies with PhDs who would be interested to relocate to India. We are also scouting for people in India too," says Rastogi. Having stints at Bell Labs India, Rastogi is charged to lead the new lab, and assemble a team of scientists and engineers to focus on new approaches to information extraction and machine learning, multimedia and query processing. In addition, Yahoo! India would be collaborating with some of the major institutes in India and Rastogi would take initiatives to be design some of the curricula to groom the talent. While addressing the media, Pranesh Anthapur, COO, Yahoo! India R&D refused to provide details of the number of staff it plans to hire for the lab. The company plans to hire sociologists, micro-economists, and computational scientists among other categories of staff for the lab, the spokeswoman said. Yahoo has similar labs in New York, Santiago, and Barcelona, along with Santa Clara, Burbank and Berkeley in California.

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