Yahoo! Opens New York Research Office

Yahoo! (YHOO Quote - Cramer on YHOO - Stock Picks) opened a research facility in New York City.

"There is great talent all around the world and certainly on the East Coast," says Ron Brachman, the scientist who has been named by the Sunnyvale, Calif., company to run the lab, in an interview. "Industries are not all centered in the Bay Area."

Brachman, who came from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a former president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. His hiring follows the November addition of Andrei Broder from IBM (IBM Quote - Cramer on IBM - Stock Picks). Like Broder, Brachman will report to Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research.

Yahoo!, which opened a research center earlier this year in Berkeley, Calif., spends about $500 million annually on research and development. The company is hoping that being in New York will help it forge relationships with media and advertising companies and local universities, Brachman says. It declined to divulge how many people would be hired in New York.

Among the topics that Yahoo! Research will tackle in New York are the creation and sharing of media content, machine learning and data analysis and how to make Internet features easier for people to use.

"The presence of Yahoo! Research on the East Coast will greatly benefit the research community," says Zvi Galil, the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University.

Yahoo! shares rose 12 cents to $41.42.

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