Dear Panos,
The judging is done. From an outstanding group of 200 proposals, twenty-two exceptional PhD students have been selected to be part of Yahoo!’s 2010 Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program. Your student, Nikolay Archak has been chosen to receive this very competitive award. Congratulations!
Supporting the academic community is a top priority at Yahoo!. We created the KSC Program to support a limited number of outstanding PhD students who we believe are doing research in very important and challenging areas. The Program provides each student with $5,000 of unrestricted funds for the support of their research activities (e.g., conference fees and travel, lab materials, professional society membership dues, etc.). The funds are distributed through the university and paid directly to the student for use at their discretion. As part of this program, the student also receives an exclusive invitation to a unique workshop (most likely to be held in August at our location in Sunnyvale, California), where we will focus on novel disciplines and important technical challenges for the Internet research community, slanted specifically for graduate students whose innovative work is just emerging. We think that the opportunity to interact with Yahoo! scientists and other top graduate students in an informal and supportive environment without having to submit papers for review will provide a unique forum for open and stimulating discussion of work in its early stages.
Students will also have the opportunity to work with select datasets through our Webscope program. Yahoo! will cover all travel expenses to the KSC Workshop independent of the $5,000 award.
We are excited to be able to support these students with KSC grants, and we look forward to having them as part of our broad research alliance of outstanding students and faculty. Please feel free to contact Jamie Lockwood at jamieloc@yahoo-inc.com if you have any questions regarding our KSC Program.
I offer you my warmest congratulations. We eagerly look forward to hosting Nikolay at our KSC Workshop as part of the Yahoo! family.
Best regards,
Ken Schmidt
Director, Academic Relations
Nikolay is not a stranger to winning competitions. He has won in the past 3 times the TopCoder competition, ended up 2nd two more times. He also has a streak of accepted publications, including a single-authored paper at WWW2010 this year.
Nikolay, congratulations!
