Yahoo said today it is holding its second annual Key Scientific Challenges Program, which is open globally to any graduate student enrolled in a PhD program at an accredited institution.

The Key Scientific Challenges Program focuses on a number of issues, from developing algorithms that make information more personally relevant, to finding insights about online advertising and experimenting with new sociological models for how people engage with the web.

"Yahoo! and the entire online industry face challenges that are increasingly complex and require an interdisciplinary approach to solve," said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Labs.

"The Key Scientific Challenges Program provides graduate students an unmatched environment that brings together social scientists, economists, computer scientists, and statisticians to collaborate in an unprecedented way. The students get the benefit of testing their research ideas in the real world, and Yahoo! gains new perspectives on the technical problems core to improving the Internet."

Winners of the Key Scientific Challenges Program will receive:

•     $5,000 in unrestricted seed funding for lab materials, travel to academic conferences, professional society memberships, and other resources to drive their research.
•     Exclusive access to selected global-scale Yahoo! datasets.
•     Personal mentoring and collaboration with Yahoo!’s world-class research scientists.
•     An invitation to present their work at the Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit, to be held in September 2010 at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

Applications for the program must be submitted by midnight PST on March 5, 2010. Winners will be announced in the spring.

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