Invited Talks
Computational Advertising
Andrei Broder, Yahoo! Research
Abstract
Computational advertising is an emerging new scientific sub-discipline, at the intersection of large scale search and text analysis, information retrieval, statistical modeling, machine learning, classification, optimization, and microeconomics. The central challenge of computational advertising is to find the "best match" between a given user in a given context and a suitable advertisement. The context could be a user entering a query in a search engine ("sponsored search") , a user reading a web page ("content match" and "display ads"), a user watching a movie on a portable device, and so on. The information about the user can vary from scarily detailed to practically nil. The number of potential advertisements might be in the billions. Thus, depending on the definition of "best match" this challenge leads to a variety of massive optimization and search problems, with complicated constraints. This talk will give an introduction to this area focusing on the interplay between science, engineering, and marketplace.
Biography
Andrei Broder is a Yahoo! Fellow and Vice President for Computational Advertising. He also serves as Chief Scientist for Yahoo's Search and Advertising Product Groups. Previously he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis in IBM Research. From 1999 until 2002 he was Vice President for Research and Chief Scientist at the AltaVista Company. He was graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University under Don Knuth. His current research interests are centered on computational advertising, web search, context-driven information supply, and randomized algorithms. Broder is co-winner of the Best Paper award at WWW6 (for his work on near-duplicate page detection) and at WWW9 (for his work on mapping the web). He has authored more than a hundred papers and was awarded twenty-five patents. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of ACM and of IEEE, and past chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing.
Towards a Psycholinguistics of Social Interaction
Zenzi M Griffin, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
In studying spoken language production and comprehension, psycholinguistic researchers have typically designed experiments in which content consists of decontextualized utterances, narratives, or descriptions of visual displays (even when studying naïve participants in dialog). Like the drunk in the night who looks for keys where the light is brightest rather than where they were lost, we have studied language processing under the easiest circumstances to manipulate and control rather than study the speech acts and discourse functions that language use more often involves. I will argue that we now have resources available to extend experimental research to language use that has little or nothing to do with description. That is, psycholinguistics is ready to address language processing in interpersonal interactions. I will describe the results of a questionnaire study of parental name substitutions that led to this line of thought.
Biography
Zenzi Griffin studied psychology at Stockholm University for one year before transferring to Michigan State University, where she completed a BA in Psychology. In 1998, she earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology (with a minor in Linguistics) from the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There she worked with Dr. Kathryn Bock and Dr. Gary Dell, becoming one of the first researchers to monitor eye movements to study language production. Dr. Griffin then spent three years as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University before moving to the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech in the summer of 2001. In 2008, she joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin as a full professor. She is a member of the Editorial Boards of Psychological Review and the Journal of Memory and Language. In addition to a wide range of collaborative projects, Dr. Griffin is currently studying the retrieval and use of personal names.