Google AI Blog: ACM EC Conference and Workshop on Ad Auctions

ACM EC Conference and Workshop on Ad Auctions

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

By Jon Feldman and Vahab Mirrokni, Google Research, NYEC 20095th Workshop on Ad Auctionstutorials

In a joint tutorial with Google researcher Muthu Muthukrishnan, we explored research problems in sponsored search inspired by taking the advertiser's perspective. Emphasizing a cross-disciplinary approach, we presented sample research directions in keyword selection, traffic prediction and bidding strategy, encouraging the research community to build upon known auction models in order to tackle these even more challenging domains. We explored in more detail specific examples of research in bidding strategies.

Moreover, in a joint tutorial with H. Roeglin, we presented results in convergence of game dynamics, both to equilibria and nearly-optimal solutions. This was a more algorithm-oriented variant of the tutorial at ICML (which is described in a previous blog post.)

Ad Auctions Workshop

Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, gave an enlightening invited talk about using Google Trends data for "predicting the present." In this work, Google Trends data is used to help improve forecasts of various economic time series. Examples illustrating this technique were drawn from the auto industry, real estate, and unemployment. He emphasized that Google Trends data is publicly available and encouraged people to use this data for their research.

We presented two papers in the workshop, one about optimal pricing mechanisms over social networks and one about using offline optimization in stochastic online ad allocation problems. In the latter talk, we presented an algorithm in which we use an optimal offline solution in an "expected instance", and use this solution as a signal in online decision making. Using the idea of the power of two choices from the CS literature, we give a novel theoretical analysis of our method, improving the best previously known result. We also gave some practical insight about using these methods in online ad allocation. The theoretical results will appear in the upcoming FOCS 2009 conference.

1 comment :

Shamim AkhtarAugust 17, 2009 at 1:31 AM
this is a nice blog.
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ACM EC Conference and Workshop on Ad Auctions

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