Yahoo! Research Launches New Research Engineering Unit in Bangalore, India
Yahoo! Research is on the move. In a major step toward becoming a truly global organization, the Research group recently launched a new Research Engineering unit in Bangalore, India.
While Yahoo! has been tapping opportunities in the Indian market for a number of years, the Research group is now ramping up its activities in the region. Along with the establishment of the new Research Engineering group, Y!R has also rolled out the Big Thinkers India Series, which features presentations by leading scientists and researchers. Moreover, many of the group’s top executives, including Prabhakar Raghavan, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Ron Brachman and Andrew Tomkins, have spent time in India spreading the Y!R message.
India as a whole represents a huge opportunity for Yahoo!, both in terms of its burgeoning market and its vast pool of talented engineers, scientists and IT professionals. The Yahoo! India Research & Development Centre in Bangalore, for instance, has already crossed the 1,000-person threshold and continues to grow rapidly.
The new Research Engineering group is starting small. It is being seeded by a select few engineering graduates from the top universities in the country. It will also begin hiring experienced personnel from outside the company.
Why a new group in Bangalore? Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, says that a central mission of the organization is to develop a world-class talent base across the globe that can help deliver next-generation applications and solutions for Yahoo! and its users. And some of the best technical talent in the world can now be found in India.
The Research Engineering unit will work closely with the existing Advanced Technology Group (ATG) run by Arun Ramanujapuram in Bangalore. ATG is committed to ensuring that the state of the scientific art is brought to market in Yahoo! products and services. The core strengths of the group are in the areas of image and video analysis, text mining and web services. "We anticipate a very synergistic relationship between Research Engineering and ATG," says Raghavan.
The Bangalore Research Engineering office will also collaborate with scientists across all Yahoo! locations in the U.S . In particular, the research engineers in Bangalore will help Y! Research scientists turn their visions into reality.
"With the Bangalore Research Engineering team, we are adding an exciting new element to Yahoo! Research and further extending the organization around the world," says Janet George, director of Research Engineering. "We are developing world-class science and inventing next-generation applications that will shape the future of the internet."
The work in Bangalore promises to be both interesting and diverse. Already, the research Engineering team is assisting with Pig, an open-source software project that will allow programmers to write applications that process large datasets very easily on a distributed computing infrastructure. This group will also work on machine learning projects in Search and Community Systems.
"The primary goal of the Research Engineering team is to help materialize the innovations coming out of Y! Research into real Yahoo! products that end users can see and feel," says Mani Abrol, manager of the Research Engineering group in Bangalore. "The next generation of products for Yahoo! will come out of Y! Research, and we in Bangalore will definitely play a big role in making that happen."
