After years of identity crisis, Yahoo has positioned itself as a content company. Yahoo won't get involved in smart phones, operating systems, fiber optics, UAVs, robots or satellites, but that doesn't mean Yahoo can't innovate.
In the future, how users discover and consume Internet content, and how to use Internet content to generate revenue, Yahoo has innovative advantages. Yahoo labs has 250 employees and is growing. They are experts in computerized advertising, personalization and human-computer interaction. They are committed to achieving the company's goal: to push the right content to the right users at the right time.
Machine learning is king
The most important technology of Yahoo labs is machine learning. There is a special machine learning team in New York. Some members are developing 'core science and theory', while others are developing a platform to open machine learning functions to all employees of Yahoo.
Yahoo also has a data science group in New York that works with the product team on application research. "We've hired machine learning scientists for almost every other group," says Ron Brachman, head of Yahoo labs, whose research areas cover advertising, data centers, social graph analysis and network security.
Advertising is Yahoo's revenue generating tool. If no one looks at the content, no one will see the advertisement. Therefore, this is why many of Yahoo's machine learning research focuses on making it easier for users to get the content they like. This means that images and videos can be searched by users like web pages, and users can search all content using natural language.
"We want users to be able to access Yahoo content anywhere on any device," balahman said of the future of natural language processing. 'for example, a user may have visual impairment, or may not be sitting in front of the computer but want to know the answer to a question, or track something.
Deep learning and artificial intelligence
When many people think of machine learning and the web, the first thing that comes to their mind is computer vision. Whether using deep learning or other technologies, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, pinterest, Dropbox, and twitter are investing in developing technologies to understand visual content. In fact, 'through Flickr and image search, Yahoo labs is developing cool technologies,' as well as indexing and recommending videos, according to balahman.
Balahman specifically mentioned the development of algorithms that can judge 'good-looking' people and improve their ranking in search results. Balachman's team has also developed an algorithm to generate video 'thumbnails' so that users can better understand the content of the video. Yahoo is also developing object recognition technology.
Yahoo everywhere
Barakhman envisions that once the technologies developed by Yahoo labs are integrated, Yahoo will be 'everywhere'. Yahoo hopes to release content to mobile phones, smart watches and public terminals. This means significant changes in input (such as keystrokes, voice, even video and geographic data), the appearance of the application, and so on.
Of course, advertising will play an important role in Yahoo's future. Fields such as' advertising science 'will still be important, though Yahoo has mastered precision advertising technology years ago, balahman said. With the continuous development of devices and advertising types, design strategies and optimization algorithms also need to keep pace with the times. For example, one of the recent big projects at Yahoo labs is a new advertising platform called Gemini, which enables advertisers to manage mobile search and native advertising through a system.
In the future of pervasive computing predicted by balaherman, Yahoo and its advertisers must figure out how to make advertising truly attractive to users.