Supporting Yahoo! JAPAN’s mission of “UPDATE JAPAN” and its aspiration to make Japan more convenient with leading-edge technologies, Yahoo! JAPAN Research works on the research and development of the next-generation of Internet technologies.

In addition, in order to create an environment that constantly produces innovations, we encourage creations through an “Invention Incentive System” to recognize excellent ideas and designs, etc., as well as actively collect and disseminate within and outside the company, information related to advanced technologies and business models of the industry and competitors.
At the same time, in order to ensure fair and free competition, we focus on risk evaluation to respect other companies’ intellectual property rights, while constructing and using an intellectual property portfolio around our own patents and others. The outcome of our R&D as well as our intellectual properties are open to external users in the form of OSS, etc. with which we hope to contribute to the development of an IT society.

Given that various devices are used in different everyday life situations, and the collection of a variety of data continues, Yahoo! JAPAN Research’s goal is value creation leading to next problem-solvings by further deepening our understanding of individuals and trends in the world.

Yahoo! JAPAN Research is broadly collaborating with Yahoo! JAPAN’s service divisions, and several universities and research institutes, in order to achieve maximum results from the valuable environment in which enormous amount of data and feedback from the customers using Yahoo! JAPAN’s services every day are collected daily. Yahoo! JAPAN Research also runs an internship program for students in anticipation of allowing them to use its resources in broadening their research and development activities.
Yahoo! JAPAN Research also has a policy of actively publishing the results of its research and development activities. It not only disseminates the results of joint research performed with universities, but it also recently started providing information about the results of our collaboration with the development teams on Yahoo! JAPAN’s services side.

ZOZO Technologies, Inc., a member of the ZOZO Group, operates an R&D team named “ZOZO research.” The mission of the team is to “quantify fashion.” Leveraging the information asset possessed by the ZOZO Group, it aims to present a scientific answer to the fascinating and puzzling question of fashion: “What does it mean to be ‘beautiful,’ ‘cool,’ and ‘cute’?”

We introduced a ranking model for constructive comments in Yahoo! JAPAN News.

A research to “predict” an irregular population density based on the location histories from a few days ago resulted in the “Irregular Congestion Prediction” function that predicts an irregular congestion at stations or trains by 10 minutes.

Yahoo! JAPAN is certified with “FIDO 2,” a new standard established by an industry association called FIDO Alliance, whose mission is to promote the standardization of biometric and other next-generation authentications. We acquired this certification in the world’s first FIDO2 certification test held in August 2018, making us the first FIDO2-certified company in Japan.
This enabled users of Android smartphones to log into Yahoo! JAPAN’s services on web browsers by using biometric authentication, such as fingerprint authentication, from October 2018.

We developed a model to auto-generate candidate topic headlines for Yahoo! JAPAN News and introduced it into the editing assistance tool.

Yahoo! JAPAN Research actively presents research results at world-leading international conferences etc. (※)

Numerous patents have been obtained from research papers published by Yahoo! JAPAN Research. Please refer to the following;

Using the Patent Score (※), the diagram demonstrates the total strength of each company’s patent asset on the vertical axis evaluated from the quality and quantity of patent assets possessed, and the individual strength of the most valuable patent of each company on the horizontal axis. The sizes of circles represent the number of patents each company has. Yahoo! JAPAN favorably compares with other world-leading companies in terms of domestic patents on the whole. Yahoo! JAPAN particularly has a strong position in the field of e-commerce, which is one of its focus areas.

Patent asset ranking is a ranking that comprehensively evaluates each company’s patents in terms of both quality and quantity, using the Patent Score. Yahoo! JAPAN placed second in the category of patents’ total strength in “Patent Asset Ranking for the Information-communication Industry 2019” published by Patent Result Co., Ltd.
Among the high-profile patents of Yahoo! JAPAN are “Advertising in navigation systems” and “Display program for enhanced ad content visibility in Internet advertising.”

Yahoo! JAPAN started the current Invention Incentives and Award Program in 2014. Ever since, the number of patent applications by Yahoo! JAPAN is increasing every year. In recent years, Yahoo! JAPAN promotes the utilization of its multi big data, which is its strength.
Yahoo! JAPAN makes an all-out effort to conduct R&D in the field of data science, which supports utilization of data, as well as to improve services utilizing data. It also actively makes patent applications in order to protect these research results with patent rights and to capitalize them.

In order to contribute to the development of the information technology society, Yahoo! JAPAN Research’s development results and intellectual properties created in Yahoo! JAPAN are made available to the public in the form of OSS, etc. Many of them are being utilized in various situations. We believe that encouraging to create a healthy market will also lead to the future development of Yahoo! JAPAN.

“yskip”, an AI/natural language processing technology that reduces the learning time of distributed representation, is made available as an OSS. This technology is used in matching information of users’ interest with articles and advertisements by machine-learning the relationship between various words from a vast amount of text data and automatically estimating the differences in the meanings of words.

This is a program that certifies selected employees as developers for OSS which is strategically adopted by Yahoo! JAPAN. Time used for developing specific OSS is regarded as work hours and a maximum of JPY 1 million budget per year is granted for the certified employees to work as OSS committers.

NGT is an OSS developed by Yahoo! JAPAN. This is a software that allows users to quickly search and identify data with multiple characteristics (high-dimensional data), such as text, image, product/user data from a large database. NGT won IPSJ Industrial Achievement Award 2019 from Information Processing Society of Japan.

Yahoo! JAPAN, a member of the Z Holdings Group, collaborates with external partners from diverse fields, including enterprises, universities, and research institutions, to make our users’ life more convenient and more enriching. We also aim to solve various social problems through these collaborative initiatives.

Making combined use of the insurance claim data and questionnaire results possessed by Anicom Insurance, Inc., and Yahoo! JAPAN’s e-commerce data on pet food purchases, we conduct analyses and validation of the suspected connection between pet food ingredients and allergies.

The objective of this joint research is to understand customer incentives and psychology behind their purchasing behavior and to optimize communications tailored for each user, utilizing both the expertise of Dr. Kosuke Uetake, Associate Professor of Marketing, Yale School of Management, who specializes in quantitative marketing and empirical industrial organization, and ZOZOTOWN’s large-scale and diverse data. Through this initiative, we aim to further enhance our services in ZOZOTOWN, and in the long run, to maximize the value of use customer lifetime value for ZOZOTOWN users.

The congestion pattern of each station is projected thorough AI (machine learning)-powered analytics of big data collected from the Yahoo! JAPAN Transit Navigation service; the data utilized includes search histories of future train/transit schedules, and is pre-processed into anonymized statistical data (removing personal identifiers). Combining this with the SEIBU RAILWAY’s data on the number of people getting off the train by stations and by time, we aim to realize even more accurate congestion prediction.

Yahoo! JAPAN has conducted demonstration experiments with various companies and municipalities, including Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., Ezaki Glico Co., Ltd., Japan Professional Football League, Kobe City, and Fukuoka City, for AI-powered big data collaboration between organizations.

Yahoo! JAPAN conducted a joint demonstration experiment with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for predicting heatstroke risks at crowded places such as event venues, with high accuracy. In the experiment, the WBGT (wet bulb globe temperature; heat stress index) open data released by the Ministry of Environment for the purpose of preventing heatstrokes was combined with the congestion information derived by Yahoo! JAPAN using its big data on location information. Congestion is considered to be one of the factors pushing up the heat stress index, and the heatstroke risks were predicted through the AI-powered analytics of the combined big data.