David Pennock

Yahoo Research

3:00pm - 4:30 pm

Wu & Chen Auditorium

101 Levine Hall

" The Automated Economy"

 

Algorithms are taking over rote tasks from people throughout the economy, from advertising to finance, from insurance to sourcing. Programs go beyond mimicking people: they crunch through vast seas of data and billions of possibilities to find solutions that may be unambiguously better for everyone involved. I'll focus on examples from advertising and finance. I'll describe how almost every aspect of advertising is being automated, including its sale, delivery, and measurement, starting with web search advertising and expanding into display, video, and mobile advertising. I'll describe the prospects of next generation financial exchanges that allow traders to create customized mutual funds on the fly by bundling together stock trades, or to place complex bets contingent on multiple outcomes, including prediction markets designed specifically for gathering and disseminating information.