Category Archives: events

computer science, economics, events, nyc, people, prediction markets, research

Prediction Market PowWow at Yahoo! Research New York, August 2011

I am incredibly lucky. Last August, I spent three days straight thinking almost exclusively about one topic: prediction markets, mostly algorithms. Even better, I was in great company: eleven incredible visitors from across the country took time out of their busy schedules to join me at Yahoo! Research NYC in an impromptu “prediction market powwow”: Yiling Chen, Sanmay Das, Lance Fortnow, Nicolas Lambert, Abe Othman, Mike Ruberry, Rahul Sami, Florian Teschner, Jenn Wortman Vaughn, Christof Weinhardt, and Lirong Xia. (Plus fellow Yahoos Miro Dudik, Sebastien Lahaie, and David Rothschild.) It’s amazing to have a job that allows this kind of time for research and blue-sky thinking: thanks Yahoo!. It’s humbling to have such stellar colleagues to work with: thanks everyone who came. It’s also wonderful to see “the kids” (former interns and postdocs) doing so well: Rahul now has tenure at U Michigan, Yiling is a professor at Harvard, Jenn is a professor at UCLA, and Nicolas is a professor at Stanford. (Lirong: You’re next!)

Here are our notes and here is a photo:

Prediction Market Powwow Yahoo! Research Aug 2011

computer science, economics, events, nyc, prediction markets, research

Two upcoming NYC-area CS-econ events: AMMA & NYCE Day

  1. The Second Conference on Auctions, health more about Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA) is next Monday and Tuesday August 22-23, generic view 2011, web at CUNY in midtown manhattan. The program, including contributed talks on school choice, prediction markets, advertising, and market design, and invited talks by market designer extraordinaire Peter Cramton and private company stock exchange SecondMarket (where millionaires buy Facebook), look to be excellent. Hope to see you there!
  2. The fourth annual New York Computer Science and Economics Day (NYCE Day) is Friday, September 16, 2011, at NYU. You have until next Friday August 26 to submit a short talk or poster. The goal of the meeting is to bring together researchers in the larger New York metropolitan area (read: DC-Boston-Chicago) with interests in computer science, economics, marketing, and business, and a common focus in understanding and developing the economics of Internet activity.
advertising, artificial intelligence, computer science, economics, events, finance, incentives, prediction markets, probability, publication, research

2011 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce and fifteen other CS conferences in San Jose

If you’re in the Bay Area, come join us at the 2011 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, June 5-9 in San Jose, CA, one of sixteen conferences that comprise the ACM Federated Computing Research Conference, the closest thing we have to a unified computer research conference.

The main EC’11 conference includes talks on prediction markets, crowdsourcing, auctions, game theory, finance, lending, and advertising. The papers span a spectrum from theoretical to applied. If you want evidence of the latter, look no further than the roster of corporate sponsors: eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.

There are also a number of interesting workshops and tutorials in conjunction with EC’11 this year, including:

Workshops:

  • 7th Ad Auction Workshop
  • Workshop on Bayesian Mechanism Design
  • Workshop on Social Computing and User Generated Content
  • 6th Workshop on Economics of Networks, Systems, and Computation
  • Workshop on Implementation Theory

Tutorials:

  • Bayesian Mechanism Design
  • Conducting Behavioral Research Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
  • Matching and Market Design
  • Outside Options in Mechanism Design
  • Measuring Online Advertising Effectiveness

The umbrella FCRC conference includes talks by 2011 Turing Award winner Leslie G. Valiant, IBM Watson creator David A. Ferrucci, and CMU professor, CAPTCHA co-inventor, and Games With a Purpose founder Luis von Ahn.

Hope to see many of you there!

computer science, economics, events, research

Four free registrations to EC’11 for students

Thanks to a generous donation from Google, we are offering four free registrations for students to attend the 2011 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’11) in San Jose.

To apply, please email David Pennock and Yoav Shoham by Wednesday May 11, 2011, with subject “YourLastName: EC’11 student registration award application” and include:

  1. Your name, university, personal homepage, and current student status (e.g., 2nd year Ph.D. student)
  2. Whether you are a member of ACM SIGecom
  3. Any papers at EC’11 for which you are an author or co-author
  4. Any papers at an EC’11 affiliated workshop (or under review) for which you are an author or co-author
  5. Please also arrange for your academic advisor to email verification of your student status in good standing to the same two email addresses with your last name in the subject.

Applications must be submitted by Wednesday May 11, 2011. We will award the four free registrations by Friday May 13, prior to the early registration deadline of May 16.

thanks,
David Pennock, Chair ACM SIGecom
Yoav Shoham, General Chair, EC’11

P.S. This was announced on April 14 on the mailing list for the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom). If you missed it, you should join! 🙂

computer science, economics, events, prediction markets, publication, research

CFP: Auctions, Market Mechanisms, and their Applications

From Peter Coles:

There is [less than] one week left to submit papers to AMMA, [The Second Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications], a market design conference that will be held in NYC this August. The conference brings together economists, computer scientists and practitioners who are interested in the use of market mechanisms to solve problems.

The best way to decide whether to submit to a conference you haven’t heard of is to look at the organizers and program committee. In this case, they’re superb.

computer science, economics, events, fun, gambling, games, prediction markets, probability, research, yahoo

Predictopus in the Times of India

2 Comments

Today, Yahoo! placed two full-page ads on the back cover of the Times of India, the largest English-language daily in the world, to promote Yahoo! Cricket, a site that reaches 13.4 percent of everyone online in India and serves as the official website of the ICC Cricket World Cup.

Take a look at the middle right of the second page: it says “Play exciting games and win big” and features… Predictopus! That’s the Indian spinoff of Predictalot, the combinatorial prediction game I helped invent.

Page 1 of two full-page Yahoo! Cricket ads in the Times of India, p. 31, 2011/03/30Predictopus on Page 2 of two full-page Yahoo! Cricket ads in the Times of India, p. 32, 2011/03/30

Predictopus has nearly 70,000 users and counting, and this ad certainly won’t hurt.

Yahoo!!!

BTW, I grabbed these images from an amazing site called Press Display, which I discovered via the New York Public Library.

Times of India Mumbai edition
30 Mar 2011

Times of India Mumbai edition
30 Mar 2011

Also, congrats India, and thanks! I nearly doubled my virtual bet with the victory:

Dave's Predictopus prediction: India will advance further than Pakistan, 3/2011

advertising, computer science, economics, events, incentives, research, yahoo

Workshops @ACM Electronic Commerce: Ad Auctions, Social Computing, June 5, 2011

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The 2011 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce will be held June 5-9 in San Jose as part of the ACM Federated Computing Research Conference. FCRC is a collection of seventeen computer science conferences with joint plenary speakers, this year featuring David A. Ferrucci, head of IBM’s Watson project, CMU professor and GWAP founder Luis von Ahn, and 2011 Turing Award winner Leslie Valiant. I’d love to someday see a true unified computer science conference in the style of the math or economics national meetings. Barring that, FCRC is the next-best thing. I hope more conferences will join.

The EC’11 list of accepted papers is out and the program looks great (including six papers from Yahoo! authors). And it’s not too late to submit a paper to one of the associated workshops. Two of particular interest, both on June 5, 2011, are:

Workshop on Social Computing and User Generated Content

The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners from a variety of relevant fields, including economics, computer science, and social psychology, in both academia and industry, to discuss the state of the art today, and the challenges and prospects for tomorrow in the field of social computing and user generated content.

Social computing systems are now ubiquitous on the web– Wikipedia is perhaps the most well-known peer production system, and there are many platforms for crowdsourcing tasks to online users, including Games with a Purpose, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the TopCoder competitions for software development, and many online Q&A forums such as Yahoo! Answers. Meanwhile, the user-created product reviews on Amazon generate value to other users looking to buy or choose amongst products, while Yelp’s value comes from user reviews about listed services…

SUBMISSIONS DUE April 15, 2011, 5pm EDT

Seventh Ad Auctions Workshop

In the past decade we’ve seen a rapid trend toward automation in advertising, not only in how ads are delivered and measured, but also in how ads are sold… The rapid emergence of new modes for selling and delivering ads is fertile ground for research from both economic and computational perspectives…

We solicit contributions of two types: (1) research contributions, and (2) position statements…

Submission deadline: April 15th, 2011 (midnight Hawaii Time)

events, finance, gambling, prediction markets, research

International Conference on Prediction and Information Markets: Who’s going?

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Abstracts are due today for the Third International Conference on Prediction and Information Markets. It will be held in Nottingham, England April 3-5 along with two related conferences: the International Conference on Gambling Studies and the International Conference on Money, Investment and Risk. (Abstracts also due today for both of these conferences.)

I’ve been considering submitting some thing(s): I’m curious if anyone else is planning to submit or attend?

Date: 3 – 5 April 2011
Event: Third International Conference on Prediction and Information Markets
Location: Nottingham Conference Centre
Organiser: Nottingham Business School

Details:

The Third International Conference on Prediction and Information Markets will be held in association with Economic Issues and the Journal of Prediction Markets.

Prediction / information markets offer a way of harnessing the wisdom of crowds. They have been used to aggregate information in order to provide forecasts of a wide range of events…

In recent years, a number of companies have employed these markets as a means of aggregating the information dispersed widely among their employees and customers…

Call for papers and presentations
Please send an abstract (maximum of 200 words) to Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams by email, by the closing date for receipt of abstracts of Monday 21 February 2011. Confirmation of receipt of abstracts will be sent within a maximum of five working days.

artificial intelligence, computer science, economics, events, finance, fun, gambling, games, hacking, prediction markets, probability, research, yahoo

Predictalot goes East: Introducing Predictopus for the ICC Cricket World Cup

Yahoo! India Predictopus logo

I’m thrilled to report that Predictalot had an Indian makeover, launching as Predictopus* for the ICC Cricket World Cup. The Yahoo! India team did an incredible job, leveraging the idea and some of the code base of Predictalot, yet making it their own. Predictopus is not a YAP — it lives right on the Yahoo! Cricket website, the official homepage for the ICC Cricket World Cup. They’re also giving away Rs 10 lakhs — or about $22,000 if my calculations are correct — in prizes. Everything is bigger in India, including the crowds and the wisdom thereof. It will be great to see the game played out on a scale that dwarfs our college basketball silliness in the US.

The Y! India team reused some of the backend code but redid the frontend almost entirely. To adapt the game to cricket, among other chores, we had to modify our simulation code to estimate the starting probabilities that any team would win against any other team, even in the middle of a game. (How likely is it for India to come back at home from down 100 runs with 10 overs left and 5 wickets lost? About 25%, we think.) These starting probabilities are then refined further by the game-playing crowds.

It’s great to see an experiment from Labs grow into a full-fledged product run by a real product team in Yahoo!, a prime example of technology transfer at its best. In the meantime, we (Labs) are still gunning for a relaunch of Predictalot itself for March Madness 2011, the second year in a row. Stay tuned.

2011/02/24 Update: An eye-catching India-wide ad campaign for predictopus is live, including homepage, finance, movies, OMG, answers, mail, everywhere! Oh, and one of the prizes is a Hyundai.

predictopus ad on Yahoo! India homepage 2011/02/24

* Yes, that’s a reference to legendary Paul the Octopus, RIP.

computer science, economics, events, research

Third Annual New York Computer Science and Economics Day

Join us at NYCE Day 2010 on Friday October 15 at the lovely New York Academy of Sciences, a gathering of “researchers in the larger New York metropolitan area with interests in Computer Science, Economics, Marketing and Business and a common focus in understanding and developing the economics of internet activity.”

If you’d like to speak in the rump session, submit your topic by Monday September 13: details on the meeting webpage. The rump session is a series of five minute talks by a variety of speakers including students, and often one of the most interesting part of the program.