Yahoo honors IIIT Hyderabad student

BANGALORE: Yahoo India R&D today announced that Ashish Mangalampalli, a second-year PhD student from IIIT Hyderabad is one of the winners of the 2009-2010 Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program Award.

Twenty-one exceptional PhD students from all over the world have been selected to be part of Yahoo’s Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program and Ashish Mangalampalli was one of them, said a press release.

Ashish is the only winner from a non-US institute/university and has been awarded with $2,000 of unrestricted funds to support his research activities and is exclusively invited to the KSC Graduate Student Summit planned for September 2009 in Sunnyvale, California, it added.

The workshop would focus on novel disciplines and important technical challenges for the Internet research community, slanted specifically for graduate students whose innovative work is emerging.

“Supporting the academic community is a top priority at Yahoo and we created the KSC Program to support outstanding PhD students who we believe are doing research in very important and challenging areas,” said Rajeev Rastogi, VP and head of Yahoo Labs Bangalore.

He added that they are excited to be able to support students like Ashish with KSC grants, and look forward to having them as part of their broad research alliance of outstanding students and faculty.

“I am extremely happy to be the winner of this prestigious award and would like to thank Yahoo for giving me this opportunity,” said Ashish Mangalampalli. He further added that apart from the monetary aspect, he valued the opportunity that Yahoo would be providing to interact with Yahoo scientists and other top graduate students in an informal and supportive environment.

The Key Scientific Challenges Program was launched on January 26, 2009.

It enables students to work alongside Yahoo's leading scientists to solve fundamental challenges and potentially contribute to the next big thing on the Web, said the release.

Students were invited to submit a paper about their current or planned research that is relevant to the challenges and explains why their work would make an impact in the area.

A committee comprising senior scientists in each research area reviewed the papers and selected a group to be a part of the program, added the release.