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!

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!

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.

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.

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:

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)

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.

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.

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.

August 20, 2010, Sunnyvale, CA

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of enormous scale artifacts resulting from the independent action of hundreds of millions of people; for example, web repositories, social networks, mobile communication patterns, and consumption in “limitless” stores… the first Research and Analysis of Tail phenomena Symposium (RATS)… will explore the different computational, statistical, and modeling problems related to tail phenomena… We are particularly encouraging summer interns in any of the Bay Area research centers to join us in the event.
We will start with a video welcome by Chris Anderson (Wired), followed by a series of invited talks by Michael Mitzenmacher (Harvard), Aaron Clauset (Univ. of Colorado), Neel Sundaresan (eBay), Sharad Goel (Yahoo! Research, NY) and Michael Schwarz (Yahoo! Research, CA).

We invite proposals for short (20 minute) talks from students and researchers working in the area.

CrowdCof2010: 1st Annual Conference on the Future of Distributed Work

October 4, 2010, San Francisco, CA

Were you crowdsourcing before it was cool? We want to hear about your projects.

We are inviting submissions on all topics regarding crowdsourcing, including:

• Past, present, and future of crowdsourcing
• Quality assurance and metrics
• Social and economic implications of crowdsourcing
• Task design/Worker incentives
• Innovative projects, experiments, and applications
• Submission Guidelines

Deadline: Sept. 1

CrowdConf will bring together researchers, technologists, outsourcing entrepreneurs, legal scholars, and artists for the first time to discuss how crowdsourcing is transforming human computation and the future of work.

Confirmed Speakers:
Sharon Chirella: Vice President, Amazon Mechanical Turk
Tim Ferriss : Author, The 4-Hour Work Week
David Alan Grier: Author, When Computers Were Human
Barney Pell: Partner, Search Strategist, and Evangelist, Microsoft
Maynard Webb: CEO, LiveOps
Jonathan Zittrain: Professor of Law and Computer Science, Harvard

Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds Workshop at NIPS 2010

December 10th or 11th, 2010, Whistler, Canada

We welcome contributions on theoretical models, empirical work, and everything in between, including but not limited to:

• Automatic aggregation of opinions or knowledge
• Prediction markets / information markets
• Incentives in social computation (e.g., games with a purpose)
• Studies of events and trends (e.g., in politics)
• Analysis of and experiments on distributed collaboration and consensus-building, including crowdsourcing (e.g., Mechanical Turk) and peer-production systems (e.g., Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers)
• Group dynamics and decision-making
• Modeling network interaction content (e.g., text analysis of blog posts, tweets, emails, chats, etc.)
• Social networks

[Covers] computational social science… [and] social computing… with an emphasis on the role of
machine learning…

Deadline for submissions: Friday October 8, 2010