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]