Yahoo's chief data officer, Dr. Usama Fayyad, has been appointed to head up a major expansion of Yahoo Research Labs, the company announced today. "We want to lay the foundation for establishing the new science that will define the future of the web and its essential role in everyday life," Fayyad was quoted in a press release.

Yahoo labs will particularly focus on the design of the algorithms Yahoo will depend on in the future. "Yahoo! Research Labs will develop the underlying scientific foundation to address complex challenges in areas including search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization, and mobility," Yahoo said in a press release.

Fayyad has serious datamining chops, having datamined for NASA's Joint Propulsion Lab through massive scientific datasets. He worked as a researcher at Microsoft Labs, and founded DMX Group, a data strategy and datamining company.