Yahoo! to open a research lab at UC Berkeley

Yahoo! to open a research lab at UC Berkeley

Yahoo! is to go into a partnership with the UC Berkeley for plans to open up a research lab near the university to get access to the ideas and concepts of the students studying and researching there. Yahoo! is looking forward to improving their search engine technologies and other services to stay in touch with the competition especially Google. The search engine company would be tapping Berkeley’s student and faculty brainpower to create the next generation of online technology.

Usama Fayyad, senior vice president and chief data officer at Yahoo said in a statement: “Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas. There are so many challenges technically that we can use all the brain power we can.” The lab expects to hire around 20 people within the first year of operations. They have not though released information about how much they plan to spend on the lab and the people they plan to hire.

Intel also has a lab located nearby established in collaboration with the University. Dana Bostrom, associate director for industry alliances at Berkeley said about their collaboration with Yahoo!: “We have many collaborations, funded and unfunded, but none as intense as this arrangement is expected to be.” Yahoo would however have to pay for getting exclusive rights of any of the University’s contribution to the lab.

Google has not taken such a step but has a funded a project at Stanford University to study how to photograph entire city blocks from the back of a moving truck.