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PhotoSoup started as a hack for an internal Yahoo! Europe Hack Day this past fall. Despite an approaching deadline for participation at the upcoming 2008 WWW conference, we could no longer resist the challenge, and had to participate. Over lunch in Barcelona, we started collecting and discussing ideas we could implement in 24 hours, that would have some potential to win.

We came up with PhotoSoup, a visual word puzzle generator that allows players to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and the photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time. The jury loved it, and we won the prize for "coolest hack."

Most of us on the PhotoSoup team work at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, Spain. The Barcelona lab is one of Yahoo!'s three international research laboratories outside the U.S., and has a truly international character. We currently speak 14 different languages and represent an equal number of nationalities. The Barcelona lab is young -- just recently we celebrated our second anniversary. Our work is focused on topics related to Web retrieval, mining, natural language processing (NLP), and multimedia.

The photo above shows the PhotoSoup team members. Simon Overell is missing from this photo. At the time of our hack, he was an intern at Yahoo! Research, but now he's now back in London on a mission to finish his PhD at Imperial College. Lluis Garcia (Yahoo! Spain) is our man with Flash running through his veins. Lluis single-handedly developed the PhotoSoup front-end in Flex and connected all the back-end components produced by the other team members.

Saludos desde España,

Roelof

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