FC 2016

Modeling and Control of Online Advertising

Abstract: Online advertising is a US$600 Billion industry where feedback control has come to play a critical role. The control problems are challenging and involve nonlinearities including discontinuities, high dimensionality, uncertainties, non-Gaussian noise, and more. In this talk we apply systems engineering principles to a core optimization problem within online advertising. First we demonstrate how the optimization problem may be turned into a control problem. Then we derive a plant model from first principle to show how uncertainties and noise propagate through the plant. The plant model reveals challenges of the control problem and provides a framework to analyze the plant behavior. Thereafter, we describe a novel and powerful technique to deal with the challenges and to form a tractable control problem.

About the Speaker: Dr. Karlsson is Vice President of Research and Development at AOL/Verizon, and directs Algorithm Research within AOL Platforms, R&D. He was recruited by Advertising.com (AOL) in 2005 to build and direct the research group responsible to develop the next generation advertising campaign control system. During his tenure at AOL Niklas has conceived and developed for example the feedback-control system within AdLearn™, and the bid randomization-based content optimization system ContentLearn™. From 2002 to 2005 Niklas was the principal investigator of navigation and feedback control at Evolution Robotics, where he e.g. invented the vSLAM™ technology which latter triggered iRobot’s acquisition of Evolution Robotics. He has developed many products and is the inventor of 27 issued U.S. patents with many more patents and products in the pipeline. Karlsson received his Ph.D. at University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Dynamic Systems, Control, and Robotics. He received an M.A. in Statistics and Applied Probability from UCSB and a M.S. in Engineering Physics from Lund University. At UCSB Niklas received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award (2000-01). And in 2015 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Mechanical Engineering in recognition of "outstanding application of systems engineering principles to the field of online advertising".