Yahoo! Speaker Series

 

Yahoo! Inc. has partnered with iLab to sponsor a speaker series at Carnegie Mellon 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.

Bryan Tamburro, senior director for strategic initiatives at Heinz College.

Yahoo! Inc.’s support enables iLab to bring leaders in information technology management and policy to campus and expose our students and faculty to the latest challenges in the field and innovative and interdisciplinary solutions.

Past Speakers

Raghu Ramakrishnan: The Future of Search and Information Discovery

Web search has traditionally focused on returning the most relevant URLs for a user’s search query terms, and portals have concentrated on aggregating and presenting information in ways designed to facilitate browsing and topical exploration. Search has been driven by algorithmic ranking approaches, and portals have relied on human curation and editorial judgement. In recent years, however, web search and content optimization for portals have come closer, and are proceeding on a path towards greater convergence.

Duncan Watts: Using the Web to do Social Science

Social science is often concerned with the emergence of collective behavior out of the interactions of large numbers of individuals, but in this regard it has long suffered from a severe measurement problem—namely that interactions between people are hard to observe, especially at scale, over time, and at the same time as observing behavior.

Sandy Pentland: Patterns of Leadership

Our patterns of communication — where, when, how, and with whom we communicate — matter as much as the content of that communication. This surprising result has been documented repeatedly by my research group at MIT, using a new measurement technology that we developed: sociometric badges. These small, wearable devices contain integrated sensor that, for the very first time, give us an accurate, objective, quantitative view of both informal and formal communication patterns.