Advertising Technology

Search systems like Yandex and Google generate 99% of their income from selling contextual advertising. Contextual advertising also generates a significant share of the income earned by Facebook, Mail.ru, and others. Engineers at these companies are constantly honing their advertisement display algorithms, benefiting the users while also bringing the owners more clients for a smaller outlay, and raising the companies revenues by several percent – equaling tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. These engineers are therefore in high demand in the workplace, and there is great academic interest in online advertising.

The seminars are led by engineers and researchers in the advertising technologies department at Yandex, who give an introduction to advertising technology, including advertising on search engines and advertising networks, click through rate (CTR) prediction, optimal ad selection and ranking, boosting ad relevance, managing price formation and using machine learning, auction theory, carrying out experiments and A/B testing, clustering, and complex approaches to evaluating experiment results. The seminars will also host students from the Yandex Data Analysis School who will give presentations on proposed articles for leading conferences on Internet advertising and from their own research work, as well as guest speakers.

Seminar audiences will be given an introduction to academic problems in advertising technology, find an academic supervisor in this subject area, and possibly be offered an internship with Yandex's advertising technology department.

See Seminar webpage for more detailed information.

Seminar moderator: Michael Levin.