Yahoo! aides IITB students in tech research

BANGALORE, INDIA: Yahoo! India Research & Development, entered into an agreement with Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB), to provide access to a cluster of servers running Yahoo!’s Open Source Hadoop software, and Web data, as part of an initiative to support the faculty and students of IITB in their research.

Hadoop is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables high scalability and helps in massive parallel data intensive computations, said a press release.

“We are pleased at Yahoo!’s support of our research. IIT Bombay’s research on search, data management and natural language processing has received national and international recognition; this partnership will help us take our research to a new level, leveraging Web scale data.” said Prof. Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT-Bombay.

The partnership will support IITB researchers study areas such as  advanced searching and ranking techniques aimed at bridging the gap between unstructured, semi-structured and structured data, information extraction and natural language processing.

Through this agreement, IIT-B researchers would have access to a cloud computing environment, allowing them to carry out research on Web-scale data, said the release.

Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP - Yahoo! labs said, “The next wave of scientific breakthroughs will come from research and development conducted at the same unprecedented scale and scope as the Internet itself.”

He further added that this collaboration would provide some of the brightest minds in India and the world with the raw computing power, Web-scale software technology and rich data sets it will take to meet that challenge.

The cluster provided by Yahoo! has been set up at IIT Bombay and is already operational.