Online Advertising

Lecturer: Dr. Ingmar Weber (Yahoo! Research, Barcelona).

About the lecturer | Course Summary | Slides and Exercises | Projects

About the lecturer: Ingmar Weber obtained his BA (2002) and MA (2003) in mathematics from Cambridge University before doing his PhD thesis (2007) at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany. His dissertation dealt with efficient data structures for and applications of a more interactive search engine called CompleteSearch. CompleteSearch now provides public search services for DBLP, the largest database of publications in computer science. Before joining Yahoo! Research he was a postdoc at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and was also a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge.
Ingmar Weber's research interests include web mining, sponsored search, social networks and efficient algorithms. He is an author of 25+ research papers, presented at most influential applied CS conferences (WWW, SIGIR, ...). In recognition of his work, he was invited to serve as a program committee member of several workshops and conferences.
As Ingmar writes on his website, he is a devoted Couchsurfing member, enjoys doing ultra triathlons and loves candy.

Course summary: One can argue that the internet as we know it, with free news portals, free email services, free social networks and, of course, free search engines, is paid for by advertisers. But how does this multi-billion dollar ecosystem actually work?
What auction mechanisms are used to decide which sponsored search results to show for "warsaw hotels"? How do such systems handle new advertisements with unknown performance characteristics? How does behavioral targeting work?
This course will address such questions and will give an introduction to the main algorithmic challenges in computational advertising.

Exercises: January [PDF], February [PDF]

Slides

Projects: [HTML]