Yahoo has brought together 23 graduate school winners of its Key Scientific Challenges program to a tech summit it is currently holding. These doctoral candidates will receive money for their research, and they’ll get to work with Yahoo to crack “a few of the biggest technical and scientific problems on the Web.” Besides more familiar problems areas such as green computing and machine learning, Yahoo researchers are exploring a field of study I hadn’t even known existed: computational advertising.
You can get a flavor of what number-crunching advertising theory is about by taking a glance at the course notes from Andrei Broder’s comp ad class at Stanford. Yahoo’s Broder is one of the field’s “foremost experts,” and was recently name to the National Academy of Engineering!
Obligatory Mad Men reference: This is not the Don Draper-Peggy Olson school of advertising. Broder, for example, has framed the bidding for page views in a so called guaranteed delivery contract as an optimization problem. Advertisers want to get as many page views for their ads for as little money as possible. Publishers want to do just the opposite.
Broder’s approach involves formulas; Draper would use a more traditional wine-and-dine technique in extracting dollars from advertising clients.
Broder also researches algorithms for placing ads on those web pages and sites that will connect with the appropriate demographics. More formulas involved with that as well.
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- Yahoo! Invites Graduate Students to Help Invent the Future of the Internet (eon.businesswire.com)
- The View from Yahoo! Labs Key Scientific Challenge Summit 2010 (ycorpblog.com)
- The Art and Science of Advertising (ycorpblog.com)
- Andrei Broder’s Introduction to Computational Advertising (stanford.edu)
