Yahoo! Partners with CMU's iLab to Sponsor Speaker Series
Apr 30, 2012
Over the past several years, Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III College has forged a strong relationship with Yahoo!, developing a partnership with the company that has proved beneficial for both students and faculty. Most recently, Yahoo! partnered with iLab, the CMU interdisciplinary research center led by Heinz College, to sponsor a speaker series at the University to foster communication and collaboration among leaders in industry and academia.
“The goal of the speaker series is to expose our students and faculty to Yahoo!’s top minds in the field of data analytics and encourage dialogue,” said Bryan Tamburro, senior director for strategic initiatives at Heinz College.
The series has hosted three speakers so far, including Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist for Search and Cloud Platforms at Yahoo!; Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program; and Duncan Watts, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research and director of the Human Social Dynamics group. The series has featured talks covering a variety of topics, including web search and the semantic web, communication patterns and leadership, and the impact of social networking on social science.
In addition to strengthening Yahoo!’s presence on campus, the speaker series has provided students the opportunity to interact with top industry minds. Such interactions have further strengthened the partnership, leading to capstone projects involving Yahoo!, as well as research discussions between Yahoo! researchers and Heinz faculty. Yahoo! has also made technology resource contributions to Heinz College, indicating the company’s commitment to the relationship.
“The value for Yahoo! is exposure to new academic research in the domain of business intelligence and data analytics,” said Tamburro. “For Heinz College, the partnership gives our students real world experience working with a top global firm and our faculty access to real questions facing the information systems industry today.”
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