Keynote

We are happy to announce that the SeAC workshop will feature a Keynote from Dr. Niklas Karlsson who is the Chief Scientist and Vice President of R&D for Verizon Media’s Demand Side Platforms.

TITLE: Self-awareness in Online Advertising for Self-managing Campaign Optimization

Programmatic advertising is at the heart of the business model for companies such as Google, Facebook, and Verizon Media. A Demand Side Platform (DSP) is a particular business model for programmatic advertising, and its goal is to manage an advertiser’s advertisement budget optimally. The DSP optimization is challenging due to an underlying high-dimensional, nonlinear, time-varying, dynamic, and stochastic process. In this talk we demonstrate how concepts from self-aware computing are suitable to solve the optimization problem. First we describe how Internet advertising and ad impression allocation work, and some of the industry trends. Thereafter we define higher-level goals and translate the optimization problem defined by the higher-level goals into decentralized learning, reasoning, and acting tasks. The problem is discussed in the framework of an LRA-M loop, which naturally leads to an intuitive understanding of the system and how to design the learning, reasoning, and action processes. In the end, the optimization system can alternatively be viewed as a combination of a low level and high-dimensional estimation system, and a high-level and low-dimensional adaptive feedback controller.

BIO:
Dr. Niklas Karlsson is the Chief Scientist and Vice President of R&D for Verizon Media’s Demand Side Platforms, where he creates and implements the research vision around feedback control, AI, and Big Data to online advertising. From 2002 to 2005, he was the principal investigator of navigation and control at Evolution Robotics, where he invented the vSLAM technology (now used as the brain of a well-known market leading autonomous vacuum cleaner). In 2005, Dr. Karlsson joined Advertising.com (AOL) to build the research group responsible for the next generation advertising campaign control system. He joined Verizon Media by way of acquisition. Dr. Karlsson received a Ph.D. in Engineering with a focus on Control Theory, Dynamic Systems, and Robotics, an M.A. in Statistics and Applied Probability, both from UC Santa Barbara, and an M.S. in Engineering Physics from Lund University. He is also an alumnus of the Stanford Executive Program and he holds 36 patents. Dr. Karlsson received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCSB in 2015, in recognition of “outstanding application of systems engineering principles to the field of online advertising”, and the Master Inventor Award from Verizon Media in 2017 (the highest technology/science recognition within the company). He is a Senior member of IEEE.