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.

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.

This collaboration is an example of Yahoo!’s global commitment to leveraging industry-academia relationships to deliver breakthrough technology and innovations. As a result of this agreement, IIT-B researchers will have access to a cloud computing environment, allowing them to carry out research on Web-scale data. The cluster provided by Yahoo! has been set up at IIT Bombay and is already operational.

Speaking at the inauguration of the Hadoop Cluster lab, 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. Yahoo!’s collaboration with IIT Bombay will 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. We’re extremely pleased to be working with IIT Bombay and excited to see what research and innovations emerge from the project.”

“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.