Yahoo! Research Takes Top Prize at EC’08
Yahoo! Research took center stage at the Ninth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’08), held July 8 to 12 in Chicago, winning the Outstanding Paper Award and having a total of seven research papers selected for the event -- more than any other organization.
The annual conference is not about using credit cards on the Internet, as the name would suggest. Rather, it is the premier scientific showcase for advances in systems and applications for electronic commerce, including predictions markets, computational advertising, and the economic aspects of social networks.
Yahoo! Research played a leading role at this year’s conference, presenting a number of thought-provoking workshops and tutorials, and taking home the top prize: the Outstanding Paper Award.
Yahoo!’s “Self-Financed Wagering Mechanisms for Forecasting,” authored by Nicolas Lambert, John Langford, Jennifer Wortman, Yiling Chen, Daniel Reeves, Yoav Shoham, and David Pennock, was one of two Outstanding Papers awarded at the conference after the selection committee narrowed the field to six finalists. The paper investigates wagering mechanisms designed to elicit truthful predictions from a group of people.
Despite a highly rigorous selection process, a total of seven Yahoo! Research papers were accepted at EC’08. No other organization had as many papers accepted. All told, the conference received 200 papers, of which only 38 were selected. This is a remarkable accomplishment for Yahoo! and a ringing endorsement of the important work being done by our research scientists.
EC’08 also featured a number of invited speakers, paper presentations, workshops, and tutorials covering all areas of electronic commerce. Yahoo!’s Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Bo Pang led a well-received tutorial called Introduction to Computational Advertising. Computational advertising is new discipline that studies the process of advertising on the Internet from a variety of angles. The tutorial focused on one important aspect of online advertising: namely, contextual relevance.
Another interesting tutorial was on Automated Mechanism Design, according to Yahoo!’s Daniel Reeves, who was in attendance. This is a promising new area at the intersection of game theory and machine learning. Basically, it involves the automated searching of a space of mechanisms to achieve certain objectives such as maximum revenue, efficiency, or fairness.
The Ad Auction workshop organized by Yahoo!’s David Pennock, Rica Gonen, and others, also generated a fair amount of buzz. There was a lot of interest, both from academia and corporate research labs, on modeling user behavior. For instance, do people scan from top to bottom? Do some ads force users to abandon reading the search results? It seems clear that the simple model from a few years ago is past its peak in popularity, and people are now interested in fine-grained aspects of user behavior to increase ad quality and clickthrough rates.
Yet another conference highlight was Peter Cramton’s invited talk on spectrum auction design. Cramton pointed out that although sponsored search seems to get all the press coverage these days, the FCC spectrum auctions involve at least as much money. The auction is likely to generate between $10 billion and $15 billion in revenue for the government, according to news reports.
As for overarching themes at this year’s conference, Yahoo!’s Sebastien Lahaie noticed a few interesting developments. Though sponsored search is always a big part of the event, this year the focus was more on applied work, rather than just theoretical models, observed Lahaie. Other emerging themes included the growing prominence of social media and peer production, which is of obvious relevance to Yahoo! properties like Yahoo! Answers.
EC’08 wasn’t all work. There were a number of banquets and outings hosted by different companies. The Yahoo! reception in particular won rave reviews. It was a perfect venue to reconnect with old industry friends and make new ones, including many graduate students and faculty in attendance for top U.S. schools. All in all, EC’08 was a very successful event and a great opportunity for Yahoo! Research to showcase its leading-edge work.
