Dallas, Texas 02/27/2014 (FINANCIALSTRENDS) – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) announced earlier in February that it has entered into a long term partnership with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as per the terms of which the IT major will pay the university $10 million over a 5 year period. In return, the premier university in the world will offer its student and staff research teams to the tech firm, with the goal of developing new age and mobile apps which can be monetized for mutual benefit going forward. The partnership has been branded as Project InMind and is to be jointly run by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) independent unit Yahoo! Labs and the research arm of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).
The partnership involves Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) throwing open its industry leading “real-time data services and infrastructure” to student researchers via its “Mobile toolkit” platform. The researchers will access the raw production data that the IT major has collected over the many years from its customer’s use of its services, to experiment with newly designed algorithms and smart phone based interfaces they have developed. The goal of the exercise is for the research fellows to help Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) come up with “new algorithms that could predict human behaviour” based on their online activity.
This move by the IT pioneer is being seen as a move to extend its reach to the future development community, while at the same time connect and leverage the new ideas being generated by the student community, in order to reinvent itself as a social media savvy firm which can compete with the likes of Facebook and Google by offering new age predictive and intuitive platforms.
The partnership also sets aside funds to be provided by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) for sponsoring chosen computer science students in further studies related to “machine learning and related technologies” being offer by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).
