Yahoo!'s Brainpower

At Berkeley, Davis developed a software for camera phones that can anticipate who you'd share a photo with based on who is in the photo. Bluetooth technology says where you are located and, most interestingly, what time of day the photo is taken. The project not only dovetails with some of the research Yahoo! has been doing in mobile media, but it can also benefit from Yahoo!'s ocean of customer data.

"One thing we've been looking at is how mobile devices can transform the way people work with media content," says Davis. "As a researcher, what I see in Yahoo! is hundreds of millions of people working together. I couldn't build that data set at Berkeley. Having access to what people look for and the media they create as a living, breathing community, that's an incredible draw."

Davis is already working closely with Yahoo! properties like Flickr, one of the earliest success stories in social networking. From a research standpoint, Flickr is something of a puzzle: How did a photo-sharing site develop a fiercely loyal community around it when Friendster, with all of its money and deep finance, couldn't?

By watching how Flickr's community functions and grows, Davis can try to tackle an even bigger question: How can Flickr's niche-community DNA be replicated on a vastly larger scale -- say a community of 200 million global users? Yahoo! is betting research will help it create such a community, not simply react to them after they are built elsewhere.

"Being able to access what people look for online will support that task," says Davis. "As we get more into the broadband Web, our understanding of that will expand by orders of magnitude."

Davis has a year off from teaching to set up the research lab in downtown Berkeley. During that time, Yahoo! will watch to see whether and how to approach other academic researchers for similar ventures.

"We hope there will be many relationships with other universities," says Raghavan. "Our intent isn't to take the viewpoint that the only good research people are our own employees, but to get the viewpoints of people in academia."