Computational Advertising – August 6-17, 2012

In cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the SIAG/DMA.

Location

This two-week program ran from August 6 to August 17, 2012. The first week was held at the Radisson RTP in the Research Triangle Park, NC. The location is in close proximity to SAMSI.

The second week was spent at SAMSI headquarters in Research Triangle Park.

Description

The first three days were spent on technical presentations by leading researchers and industry experts, to bring everyone up to speed on the currently used methodology. On the fourth day, the participants self-organized into working groups, each of which addressed one of the key problem areas (it is permitted that people join more than one group, and the organizers try to arrange the working group schedules to faciliate that).

The activities in the working groups addressed real-world datasets provided by the corporate participants. Datasets made available include:

Recommender systems data: (1) The Yahoo! music data; (2) Yahoo! search marketing advertiser bidding data; (3) Yahoo! search marketing advertiser bidding data; (4) Yahoo! Front Page Today module user click log data

Web Search: (1) Learning to Rank competition data.

Advertising: (1) Click logs from a real-world system (to be released, tentative at this point).

e-commerce: (1) Epinions: data to study user trust and product ratings.

Schedule and Supporting Media

Monday, August 6, 2012
Radisson RTP

Time Description Speaker Slides Videos
8:00-8:45 Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:45-9:00 Welcome & Overview
9:00-10:00 Marketing Perspectives on Online Advertising Blake McShane, Northwestern University
10:00-10:30 Break
10:30-11:30 Bootstrapping R-Fold Tensor Data Art Owen, Stanford University  
11:30-12:30 Influence and Homophily in Online Behavior Dean Eckles, Stanford University and Facebook
12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:30 Measuring Advertising Effectiveness in the Digital Age Justin Rao, Microsoft
2:30-3:30 Bayesian Inference from Non-Ignorable Network Sampling Designs Simon Lunagomez, Harvard University
3:30-4:00 Break
2:30-3:30 Current Challenges in Online Advertising Mark Lowe, MaxPoint Interactive
5:00-5:30 Poster Advertisement Session: 2 minute ads by each poster presenter
5:30-7:30 Poster Session and Reception

Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Radisson RTP

Time Description Speaker Slides Videos
8:00-9:00 Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:00-10:00 Recommendation with a Reason: Collaborative Topic Modeling for Recommending Scientific Articles Chong Wang, Princeton University  
10:00-10:30 Break
10:30-11:15 Statistical Modeling of Social Networks Mark Handcock, University of California, Los Angeles  
11:15-12:00 Bid Optimizing and Inventory Scoring in Targeted Online Advertising Claudia Perlich, Media6Degrees  
Noon-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:30 Neel Sundaresan, eBay
2:30-3:00 Break
3:00-4:00 Inverse Regression for Analysis of Sentiment in Text Matt Taddy, University of Chicago
4:00-5:00 Multi-Relational Learning via Hierarchical Nonparametric Bayesian Collective Matrix Factorization Hongxia Yang, IBM  

Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Radisson RTP

Time Description Speaker Slides Videos
8:00-9:00 Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:00-10:00 Fast Computational Approaches for Predictive Inference for Time Correlated Data Streams Nalini Ravishanker, University of Connecticut  
10:00-10:30 Break
10:30-11:30 Statistical Models in Keyword Bidding Xiaoming Huo, Georgia Tech  
11:30-12:00 Regularization for Matrix Factorization Robert Bell, AT&T
Noon-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:30 Social Network Analysis Through Randomly Sampled Respondents Tian Zheng, Columbia University  
2:30-3:00 Break
3:00-4:00 Key Lessons Learned Building Recommender Systems for Large-Scale Social Networks Christian Posse, LinkedIn
4:00-5:00 Webpage Personalization and User Profiling Liang Zhang  

Thursday, August 9, 2012
Radisson RTP

Time Description Speaker Slides Videos
8:00-9:00 Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:00-10:30 Moderated Group Discussion Moderator: David Banks, Duke University
10:30-11:00 Break
11:00-12:30 Discussion of datasets Yang Yang, Yahoo  
12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:30 Formation of Working Groups
2:30-3:00 Break
3:00-4:00 Initial discussions

Friday, August 10, 2012
at SAMSI, Rooms 104, 150

Time Description Speaker Slides Videos
8:30-9:00 Continental Breakfast
Rooms 104 and 150
9:00-5:00 Working Groups – TBA
12:00-1:30 Lunch

Monday, August 13 – Thursday, August 16, 2012
at SAMSI, Rooms 104, 150

Time Description Speaker Slides Videos
8:30-9:00 Continental Breakfast
Rooms 104 and 150
9:00-5:00 Working Groups – TBA
12:00-1:30 Lunch

Friday, August 17, 2012
at SAMSI, Room 150

Time Description Speaker Slides Videos
8:30-9:30 Continental Breakfast
Room 150
9:30-12:00 Presentations by Working Groups and Discussion about Future Projects
12:00-1:30 Lunch
1:30 Adjourn