Ashish Mangalampalli wins the prestigious Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Program Award

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Bangalore, April 28, 2009: Press Release Point - Yahoo! India R&D announced that Ashish Mangalampalli, a 2nd year PhD student from IIIT Hyderabad is one of the winners of the 2009-2010 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program Award.

Twenty-one exceptional PhD students from all over the world have been selected to be part of Yahoo!’s Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program and Ashish Mangalampalli is one of them. Ashish is the only winner from a non-US institute/university and has been awarded with $2,000 of unrestricted funds to support his research activities and is exclusively invited to the KSC Graduate Student Summit planned for September 2009 in Sunnyvale, California. The workshop will focus on novel disciplines and important technical challenges for the Internet research community, slanted specifically for graduate students whose innovative work is emerging.

“Supporting the academic community is a top priority at Yahoo! and we created the KSC Program to support outstanding PhD students who we believe are doing research in very important and challenging areas,” said Rajeev Rastogi, VP and Head of Yahoo! Labs Bangalore. “We are excited to be able to support students like Ashish with KSC grants, and we look forward to having them as part of our broad research alliance of outstanding students and faculty,” Rastogi added.

“I am extremely happy to be the winner of this prestigious award and would like to thank Yahoo! for giving me this opportunity. Apart from the monetary aspect, I value the opportunity that Yahoo! will be providing to interact with Yahoo! scientists and other top graduate students in an informal and supportive environment, said Ashish Mangalampalli, Winner of KSC Award Program. “I would like to take this opportunity to thank my teachers and peers at IIIT Hyderabad, and in particular, my advisor, Dr. Vikram Pudi, Director, Prof. Rajeev Sangal, Dean (R&D), Prof. P.J. Narayanan, and Dean (Academics), Prof. Kamal Karlapalem,” he added.

The Key Scientific Challenges Program was launched on 26th January 2009. It enables students to work alongside Yahoo!'s leading scientists to solve fundamental challenges and potentially contribute to the next big thing on the Web. Students were invited to submit a paper about their current or planned research that is relevant to the challenges and explains why their work would make an impact in the area. A committee composed of senior scientists in each research area reviewed the papers and selected a group to be a part of the program.

Yahoo! Labs is pioneering the new sciences underlying the Web. As the center of scientific excellence for Yahoo!, Yahoo! Labs delivers both fundamental and applied scientific leadership through published research and new technologies powering the company's products.

About Yahoo! India Research & Development

Yahoo! India R&D was established with a mission to deliver product and technology innovation to create a significant business impact globally. The organization has invested in specialist talent in key areas like product managers, user experience designers, architects, developers, program managers, quality engineers, service engineers and researchers to build a world-class team in India.

Yahoo! India R&D engages in end-to-end product development from concept through launch. It also runs the entire Yahoo! network, which one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide, on a 7x12 basis. The research arm, called Yahoo! Labs, focuses on basic and applied research in the areas of next-generation search, advertising and large-scale computing systems.

Yahoo! India R&D has built out best in class consumer experiences and online advertising products for both global and emerging markets. Some of its products like Yahoo! Hot Jobs, Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Cricket are well known.