Computer science Ph.D. students Shauvik Roy Choudhary, Shuang Hao and Chengwei Wang are three of 30 students nationwide awarded the 2012 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Program award. 

The program rewards the best of those research proposals submitted by doctoral students to address seven different scientific challenges which Yahoo! believes are critical to fueling innovation on the Web.

Both Choudhary, advised by Associate Professor Alex Orso, and Hao, advised by Associate Professor Nick Feamster, submitted proposals that address the Privacy & Security challenge.  Choudhary's proposal, "Automated Detection of Spam and Phishing Websites using DOM Tree Matching," focused on the development of a scalable system to detect a phishing site based on the information on its pages and the domains it interacts with. Hao's proposal, "Lightweight and Early Detection of Internet Scam Activity," applies a combination of statistical learning techniques and domain knowledge to build efficient detection system that defends against Internet scam activities. 

Wang, advised by Professor Karsten Schwan, submitted a proposal to address the Web Information Management challenge. His proposal, "Monitoring and Analytics System for Managing Large-Scale Data Centers," proposed VScope, a flexible monitoring and analysis system with novel software abstractions and mechanisms for troubleshooting large-scale, latency-sensitive cloud services.

Each student will received $5,000 unrestricted seed funding, the opportunity to collaborate directly with Yahoo! scientists, and an invitation to this summer’s Yahoo! Graduate Student Summit.

For more information about the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge program, visit its website.