Yahoo Beijing Global R&D Center was one of the three Yahoo R&D Centers of the world,was founded on June,2009. The center conducts research in four areas: personalization, advertising, mobile, and cloud computing. It employs almost 400 full-time researchers and engineers. The center operates under a mission of PaaS (Platform as a service) through a combination of science and engineering.
The center maintains a research agenda that focuses on four areas:
Personalization involved the research on content understanding modeling, user behavior modeling, and interests modeling, as well as machine-learning ranking.By researches on content understanding modeling and user behavior modeling to manage, select, match and sort the contents and to understand what users like. By machine-learning ranking to continuously optimize models .To continuously learn and optimize the system a learning infrastructure is built to support the life cycle of this science-driven engineering: streamline the steps from user activity instrumentation to signal collection and processing, feature extraction, model training, offline evaluation, and to online bucket testing.
Advertising involved the research on Targeted advertising, Real-time bidding and Search advertising.
Mobile contains Mobile Backend Services, application and Mobile SDK（basic building blocks）.
Cloud computing Applying infrastruction to build the big data platform that enables next-generation of mathematical models, real-time insights and predictive analytics, by improving a variety of serving containers to support a serving containers with the ability to scale not only horizontally but also vertically across different abstraction layers. The next-generation data storage system supports multi-petabyte scale data storage, such as offers storage services to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, and Flickr.
May 19, 2013, "Yahoo Beijing R&D Hack Day" is held in Beijing，which is the first "Hack Day" of mainland China. This event attracted thousands of students of key universities in China. Through 24-hour competition, three students from Tsing Hua Universities and Zhejiang Universities won the champions with the project of "Easy Travel".Nov. 8th, 2005, Yahoo organized the first "Hack Day", originally it was a competition of skills and creativity as well as entertaining activities only for Yahoo employees. Sep. 29th to 30th, 2006, Yahoo Campus, the first "Hack Day" run publicly by Yahoo, was held in Sunnyvilee, California.
