Category Archives: events

Yahoo! Open Hack Day Sunnyvale, Sept 12-13, 2008

Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2008 As Jed points out, “an idea is only the first step in innovation, and it’s by far the easiest step”.

Yahoo! Hack Day was created precisely to summon and celebrate the hard step of innovation: the build it step. The goal is simple: take an idea and make it real — in 24 hours. Spend all day and all night coding until a working, useable, if brittle prototype of your idea emerges. Then show it off.

Hack Day is a religion inside Yahoo!, but on September 12-13, 2008, Yahoo! will open up its Sunnyvale campus, inviting any developer who feels like it to join the geek-out frenzy. Sign up here.

Schedule

8am-6pm PT Friday: Over 20 workshops covering YUI and the newest API offerings from Yahoo!, including BOSS, SearchMonkey, Fire Eagle, and more, and previews of what’s next.

8pm Friday: A surprise musical guest takes the stage (it’s not 2006 guest Beck, but apparently the lyrics are “hacker-friendly” and “may not be appropriate for young children”). Hacking continues all night.

2pm Saturday: Judging, including a special hack-off for the winners of the University Hack Days.

Saturday evening: Awards.

History, thoughts, and notes

At the first Open Hack Day in 2006 in Sunnyvale (see photos), 400 developers fueled by 500 pizzas and a live Beck performance cranked out 54 hacks. At Open Hack Day London lightening struck twice and it rained indoors. Bangalore followed.

If you’re a student, Yahoo! Hack Week may be coming to a campus near you. We’ve held Hack Weeks at Georgia Tech, CMU, UIUC, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, and I believe Waterloo is next. Here’s a quote describing these Hack U events: “Computer science students fueled by fast food, ultra-caffeinated beverages, and alternative music, are free to let their imaginations run wild, tapping the Yahoo! library of APIs to create hacks that advance the Internet experience.”

Why Hack Day? Many an engineer join Jed in lamenting how the PowerPointy set co-opted the term innovation, rendering it almost meaningless. Hack Day was created in part to reclaim innovation for the makers.

Why does it work? Hack Day is to programmers what NaNoWriMo is to writers: a timed artistic challenge that on it’s face is a ludicrous and artificial pretense for accomplishing a goal. Yet somehow the exercise induces a psychological state perfect for making progress on the initial “80% phase” of creation. The punishing deadline forces all meta processing aside — no critic, no perfectionist, no planner, no lazy dreamer — and encourages the raw energy embodied by Nike’s Kirk-beats-Spock slogan “just do it”.

A number of Yahoo! products, services, and features were born on a Hack Day (here are two). Yoopick was too.

Why open?

Openness is one of only three overarching goals for Yahoo!. The other two goalsstarting point for users and must buy for advertisers — are in some sense incontrovertible, yet the openness goal reflects a riskier “if we build it they will come” stand that’s grounded in Yahoo!’s respect for and debt of gratitude to Internet culture. Open Hack Day, Hadoop, Pig, cloud computing, academic relations, publications, APIs, BOSS, SearchMonkey, YUI, Pipes, OpenSocial, and OpenID are among the many examples showing that Yahoo!’s commitment to openness is real. (Jeremy, RIP 2008, said it better.)

Update 2008/09/11: Blueprint mobile SDK and more Y! Open announcements (music, homepage, mail, ads)

Update 2008/09/26: CNET says: Yahoo Open: Finally, a real answer to Google. Also, Google spouse Kara Swisher gets defensive and rewrites history.

New York Computer Science and Economics Day (NYCE Day) October 3, 2008

We invite participants to the first New York Computer Science and Economics Day (NYCE Day), viagra 60mg October 3 2008, unhealthy at the New York Academy of Sciences, 7 World Trade Center.

NYCE Day is a gathering for people in the NYC metropolitan area with interests in auction algorithms, economics, game theory, e-commerce, marketing, and business to discuss common research problems and topics in a relaxed environment. The aim is to foster collaboration and the exchange of ideas.

The program features invited speakers Asim Ansari (Columbia), Susan Athey (Harvard), Constantinos Daskalakis (MIT), and Tuomas Sandholm (CMU), and a rump session with short contributed presentations.

You can indicate your interest in the event on upcoming.yahoo but official registration should go through NYAS.

Your participation and suggestions are greatly welcome. Please distribute this announcement to people and groups who may be interested.

Thanks,
NYCE Day Organizers
 Anindya Ghose, NYU
 S. Muthu Muthukrishnan, Google
 David Pennock, Yahoo!
 Sergei Vassilvitskii, Yahoo!

P.S. This is one week prior and in the same location as the Symposium on Machine Learning.

P.P.S. For those familiar, NYCE Day is inspired as a Right Coast version of BAGT.

P.P.P.S. The New York Academy of Sciences in a spectacular venue. See for yourself.

Call for Papers and Participation: Workshop on Prediction Markets: Chicago, July 9 2008

I am happy to announce the following prediction market workshop and solicit submissions and participants.


=======================================================================
Call for Contributions and Participation

Third Workshop on Prediction Markets

http://betforgood.com/events/pm2008/index.html

Afternoon of July 9, 2008
Chicago, Illinois

In conjunction with the
ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’08)

SUBMISSIONS DUE May 23, 2008
=======================================================================

We solicit research contributions, system demonstrations, and
participants for the Third Workshop on Prediction Markets, to be held
in conjunction with the Ninth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
(EC’08). The workshop will bring together researchers and
practitioners from a variety of relevant fields, including economics,
finance, computer science, and statistics, in both academia and
industry, to discuss the state of the art today, and the challenges
and prospects for tomorrow in the field of prediction markets.

A prediction market is a financial market designed to elicit a
forecast. For example, suppose a policymaker seeks a forecast of the
likelihood of an avian flu outbreak in 2009. She may float a security
paying $1 if and only if an outbreak actually occurs in 2008, hoping
to attract traders willing to speculate on the outcome. With
sufficient liquidity, traders will converge to a consensus price
reflecting their collective information about the value of the
security, which in this case directly corresponds to the probability
of outbreak. Empirically, prediction markets often yield better
forecasts than other methods across a diverse array of settings.

The past decade has seen a healthy growth in the field, including a
sharp rise in publications and events, and the creation of the Journal
of Prediction Markets. Academic work includes mechanism design,
experimental (laboratory) studies, field studies, and empirical
analyses. In industry, several companies including Eli Lilly, Corning,
HP, Microsoft, and Google have piloted internal prediction
markets. Other companies, including ConsensusPoint, InklingMarkets,
InTrade, and NewsFutures, base their business on providing public
prediction markets, prediction market software solutions, or
consulting services. The growth of the field is reflected and fueled
by a wave of popular press articles and books on the topic, most
prominently Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”.

Workshop topics
===============

The area of prediction markets faces challenges regarding how best
to design, deploy, analyze, implement, and understand prediction
markets. One important research direction is designing mechanisms for
prediction markets, especially for events with a combinatorial outcome
space. Another notable issue is manipulation in prediction
markets. Understanding the effect of manipulation is especially
important for prediction markets to find their way to assist
individuals and organizations in making critical decisions. Moreover,
how to implement market mechanisms that not only are easy to use but
also facilitate information aggregation has been an important problem
for practitioners. Prediction markets face social and political
obstacles including antigambling laws and moral and ethical concerns,
both real and constructed.

Submissions of abstracts for research contributions from a rich set
of empirical, experimental, and theoretical perspectives are
invited. Topics of interest at the workshop include, but are not
limited to:

* Mechanism design
* Game-theoretic analysis of mechanisms, behaviors, and dynamics
* Decision markets
* Combinatorial prediction markets
* Market makers for prediction markets
* Manipulation and prediction markets
* Order matching algorithms
* Computational issues of prediction markets
* Liquidity and thin markets
* Laboratory experiments
* Empirical analysis
* Prediction market modeling
* Industry and field experience
* Simulations
* Policy applications and implications
* Internal corporate applications
* Legal and ethical issues

Submissions of summaries for demonstrations on prediction market
systems are invited. Systems of interest at the workshop include, but
are not limited to:

* Implemented combinatorial prediction markets
* Mature systems and commercial products of market mechanisms
* Research prototypes on prediction markets
* Other collective prediction systems

Submission instructions
=======================

Research contributions should report new (unpublished) research
results or ongoing research. We request an abstract not exceeding one
page for every research contribution.

For system demonstrations, a summary of up to two pages including
technical content to be demonstrated is requested. Please indicate if
the demonstration requires network access.

Research contributions and system demonstrations should be submitted
electronically to the organizing committee at pm2008@umich.edu no
later than midnight Hawaii time May 23, 2008.

At least one author of each accepted research contribution and
system demonstration will be expected to attend and present or
demonstrate their work at the workshop.

Important dates
===============

May 23, 2008: Submissions due midnight Hawaii Time

May 30, 2008: Notification of accepted research contributions and
system demonstrations

July 9, 2008: Workshop date

Organizing committee
====================

Yiling Chen, Yahoo! Inc
David Pennock, Yahoo! Inc
Rahul Sami, University of Michigan
Adam Siegel, Inkling Markets

More information
================

For more information or questions, visit the workshop website:
http://betforgood.com/events/pm2008/index.html

or email the organizing committee: pm2008@umich.edu

Call for Papers and Participation: Workshop on Ad Auctions: Chicago, July 8-9 2008

I am happy to announce the following ad auctions workshop and solicit submissions and participants.


=======================================================================
Call for Papers

Fourth Workshop on Ad Auctions
http://research.yahoo.com/workshops/ad-auctions-2008/

July 8-9, 2008
Chicago, Illinois, USA

SUBMISSIONS DUE MAY 11, 2008

In conjunction with the
ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’08)
=======================================================================

We solicit submissions for the Fourth Workshop on Ad Auctions, to be
held July 8-9, 2008 in Chicago in conjunction with the ACM Conference
on Electronic Commerce. The workshop will bring together researchers
and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss the latest
developments in advertisement auctions and exchanges.

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. Web search advertising has led the way, selling
space on search results pages for particular queries in continuous,
dynamic “next price” auctions worth billions of dollars annually.

Now auctions and exchanges for all types of online advertising —
including banner and video ads — are commonplace, run by startups and
Internet giants alike. An ecosystem of third party agencies has grown
to help marketers manage their increasingly complex campaigns.

The rapid emergence of new modes for selling and delivering ads is
fertile ground for research from both economic and computational
perspectives. What auction or exchange mechanisms increase advertiser
value or publisher revenue? What user and content attributes
contribute to variation in advertiser value? What constraints on
supply and budget make sense? How should advertisers and publishers
bid? How can both publishers and advertisers incorporate learning and
optimization, including balancing exploration and exploitation? How do
practical constraints like real-time delivery impact design? How is
automation changing the advertising industry? How will ad auctions and
exchanges evolve in the next decade? How should they evolve?

Papers from a rich set of empirical, experimental, and theoretical
perspectives are invited. Topics of interest for the workshop include
but are not limited to:

* Web search advertising (sponsored search)
* Banner advertising
* Ad networks, ad exchanges
* Comparison shopping
* Mechanism and market design for advertising
* Ad targeting and personalization
* Learning, optimization, and explore/exploit tradeoffs in ad placement
* Ranking and placement of ads
* Computational and cognitive constraints
* Game-theoretic analysis of mechanisms, behaviors, and dynamics
* Matching algorithms: exact and inexact match
* Equilibrium characterizations
* Simulations
* Laboratory experiments
* Empirical characterizations
* Advertiser signaling, collusion
* Pay for impression, click, and conversion; conversion tracking
* Campaign optimization; bidding agents; search engine marketing (SEM)
* Local (geographic) advertising
* Contextual advertising (e.g., Google AdSense)
* User satisfaction/defection
* User incentives and rewards
* Affiliate model
* Click fraud detection, measurement, and prevention
* Price time series analysis
* Multiattribute and expressive auctions
* Bidding languages for advertising

We solicit contributions of two types: (1) research contributions,
and (2) position statements. Research contributions should report new
(unpublished) research results or ongoing research. The workshop
proceedings can be considered non-archival, meaning contributors are
free to publish their results later in archival journals or
conferences. Research contributions can be up to ten pages long, in
double-column ACM SIG proceedings format:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
Position statements are short descriptions of the authors’ view of how
ad auction research or practice will or should evolve. Position
statements should be no more than five pages long. Panel discussion
proposals and invited speaker suggestions are also welcome.

The workshop will include a significant portion of invited
presentations along with presentations on accepted research
contributions. There will be time for both organized and open
discussion. Registration will be open to all EC’08 attendees.

The first three workshops on sponsored search auctions successfully
attracted a wide audience from academia and industry working on
various aspects of web search advertising. Following the footsteps of
the previous workshops, the Fourth Workshop on Ad Auctions strives to
be a venue that helps address challenges in the broader field of
online advertising, by providing opportunities for researchers and
practitioners to interact with each other, stake out positions, and
present their latest research findings. While the first three
workshops focused on web search advertising, we have broadened the
scope this year to include auctions and exchanges for any form of
online advertising.

Submission Instructions
=======================

Research contributions should report new (unpublished) research
results or ongoing research. The workshop’s proceedings can be
considered non-archival, meaning contributors are free to publish
their results later in archival journals or conferences. Research
contributions can be up to ten pages long, in double-column ACM SIG
proceedings format:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
Positions papers and panel discussion proposals are also welcome.

Papers should be submitted electronically using the conference
management system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=adauctions2008
no later than midnight Hawaii time, May 11, 2008. Authors should also
email the organizing committee ( adauctions2008@yahoogroups.com ) to
indicate that they have submitted a paper to the system.

At least one author of each accepted paper will be expected to attend
and present their findings at the workshop.

Important Dates
===============

May 11, 2008 Submissions due midnight Hawaii time
a. Submit to:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=adauctions2008
b. Notify adauctions2008@yahoogroups.com
May 23, 2008 Notification of accepted papers
June 8, 2008 Final copy due

Organizing Committee
====================

Susan Athey, Harvard University
Rica Gonen, Yahoo!
Jason Hartline, Northwestern University
Aranyak Mehta, Google
David Pennock, Yahoo!
Siva Viswanathan, University of Maryland

Program Committee
=================

Gagan Aggarwal, Google
Animesh Animesh, McGill University
Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft
Tilman Borgers, University of Michigan
Max Chickering, Microsoft
Chris Dellarocas, University of Maryland
Ben Edelman, Harvard University
Jon Feldman, Google
Jane Feng, University of Florida
Slava Galperin, A9
Anindya Ghose, New York University
Kartik Hosanagar, University of Pennsylvania
Kamal Jain, Microsoft
Jim Jansen, University of Pennsylvainia
Sebastien Lahaie, Yahoo!
John O. Ledyard, Caltech
Ying Li, Microsoft
Ilya Lipkind, A9
Preston McAfee, Yahoo!
Chris Meek, Microsoft
John Morgan, University of California Berkeley
Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University
Abhishek Pani, Efficient Frontier
Martin Pesendorfer, London School of Economics
David Reiley, Yahoo!
Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University
Catherine Tucker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rakesh Vohra, Northwestern University

More Information
================

For more information or questions, visit the workshop website:
http://research.yahoo.com/workshops/ad-auctions-2008/

or email the organizing committee:
adauctions2008@yahoogroups.com

FYI 2 CFPs: WWW2008-IM & ACM EC'08

Here are two Call For P*s for upcoming academic/research conferences:

  1. Call for Participation: For the first time, the World Wide Web Conference has a track on Internet Monetization, including topics in electronic commerce and online advertising. The conference will be held in Beijing April 21-25, 2008. If the Olympics in China are all about image, then the Internet in China is all about, well, Monetization. (A lot of it, growing fast.)
  2. Call for Papers: The 2008 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce will be held in Chicago July 8-12, 2008 in proximity to AAAI-08 and GAMES 2008. Research papers on all aspects of electronic commerce — including personal favorites prediction markets and online advertising — are due February 7, 2008.

You can signal your interest on social events calendar upcoming.org: WWW2008 | EC’08

Hope to see some of you in either the Forbidden or Windy City, as the case may be.

Thoughts from WWW2007 on web science, web history, and misc

WWW2007 LogoEarlier this month, I spent a few days in lovely Banff, Alberta, Canada, at WWW2007, the 16th International World Wide Web Conference. Here are my thoughts from the event. [See also: Yahoo! Research’s writeup.]

It’s becoming clear that other sciences beyond computer science, including economics and sociology, are necessary for understanding the web and realizing its full potential. This theme ran through both Tim Berners-Lee’s and Prabhakar Raghavan’s plenary talks. For every new advance in the web, once it reaches critical mass, the economic incentives to manipulate the system inevitably emerge. Email led to spam. Altavista led to keyword spam. Google led to link spam. Blogs led to comment and trackback spam. Folksonomies led to tag spam. Recommender systems and aggregators (e.g., Digg) led to shilling. It’s clear that a better understanding of incentives, game theory, and system equilibrium is needed, beyond just cool engineering feats. The University of Michigan calls this incentive-centered design and has a world-class research team exploring the topic; see Jeff MacKie-Mason’s blog ICD Stuff for an interesting and accessible discussion. Yahoo! Research is also betting on the importance of human incentives, building a group of economists and sociologists to complement our contingent of computer scientists.

Among conference events, nowhere was the convergence of economics and computer science more clear than at the Third Workshop on Sponsored Search Auctions. The workshop is a rare venue where terms like Nash equilibrium and NP-complete can coexist in harmony. The workshop explored the intricacies of web search advertising, a multi-billion dollar industry experiencing rapid growth. Contributions included new designs for auctioning off advertising space, new analyses of the systems currently used by search engines, new tools to help advertisers, and empirical studies of the industry. Participants included representatives from both academia and industry, including economists, computer scientists, search engine employees (including representatives from the “big three”: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!), and search engine marketers. Yahoo! had a large presence at the workshop: Yahoo! scientists (including me) served on the organizing committee, Yahoo! employees and interns presented six of the fourteen peer-reviewed papers, and many Yahoos attended, contributing to their voice to the discussion of this emerging field.

Bradley Horowitz‘s talk also emphasized the new web order, where artists are needed as much as technologists: artists who can envision, create, and orchestrate online communities can be the difference between mass adoption and a flop.

An interesting addition to the WWW program was the Web History track and the Web History Center. Some of the talks were fascinating. Hermann Maurer recounted stories of interactive TV products that proliferated in Europe in the 1970’s and that mirrored almost everything that is done on the Web today in a primitive form. [Some keywords to search for if you’re interested: PRESTEL, Teletel/Minitel (France), MUPID (Austria).] For example, one massive multiplayer game, which involved social exploration of 64 million virtual planets, each with a hidden secret, was so wildly popular that it crashed the network. The apparent winner of the contest returned his prize, admitting that he didn’t actually solve for the secrets, but rather hacked into the system and reverse engineered the code. This pre-Internet system even featured some things I’m still waiting for on today’s web, like micropayments.

CFP: Second Workshop on Prediction Markets

We’re soliciting research paper submissions and participants for the Second Workshop on Prediction Markets, to be held June 12, 2007 in San Diego, California, in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce and the Federated Computing Research Conference. The workshop will have an academic/research bent, though we welcome both researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to attend to discuss the latest developments in prediction markets.

See the workshop homepage for more details and information.

You can signal your intent to attend at upcoming.org, though official registration must go through the EC’07 conference.

CFP: Third Workshop on Sponsored Search

We’re soliciting research paper submissions and participants for the Third Workshop on Sponsored Search, to be held May 8, 2007 in Banff, Canada, in conjunction with the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007). The workshop will have an academic/research bent, though we welcome both researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to attend to discuss the latest developments in sponsored search research. Attendance will be open to all WWW2007 registrants.

See the workshop homepage for more details and information.

Sponsored search is a multi-billion dollar industry in rapid growth. Typically, web search engines auction off advertising space next to their standard algorithmic search results. Most major search engines, including Ask, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, rely on sponsored search to monetize their services. Advertisers use sponsored search to procure leads and manage their customer acquisition process. Third party search engine marketers (SEMs) help advertisers manage their keyword portfolios and bidding campaigns. Academic work on sponsored search has only recently begun.

You can indicate your intent to attend at upcoming.org, though please note that official registration must go through the WWW2007 conference.

Hope to see you in Banff!

confab.yahoo: Thanks everyone!

Thanks to all two hundred and seventy (!) of you who attended the confab.yahoo last Wednesday, as far as I know a record audience for an event devoted to prediction markets. [View pictures]

Thanks for spending your evening with us. Thanks for waiting patiently for the pizza and books! Thanks to the speakers (Robin, Eric, Bo, Leslie, myself, Todd, Chris, and Adam) who, after all, make or break any conference: in this case IMO definitely “make”. The speakers delivered wit and wisdom, and did it within their allotted times! It’s nice to see Google, HP, Microsoft, and Yahoo! together in one room discussing a new technology and — go figure — actually agreeing with one another for the most part. Thanks to James Surowiecki for his rousing opening remarks and for doing a fabulous job moderating the event. Thanks to the software demo providers Collective Intellect, HedgeStreet, HSX, and NewsFutures: next time we’d like to give that venue more of the attention is deserved. Thanks to Yahoo! TechDev and Yahoo! PR for planning, marketing, and executing the event. A special thanks to Chris Plasser, who orchestrated every detail from start to finish flawlessly while juggling his day job, making it all look easy in the process.

Many media outlets and bloggers attended. Nice articles appear in ZDNet and CNET, the latter of which was slashdotted yesterday. The local ABC 11 o’clock news even featured a piece on the event [see item #35 in this report]. I’m collecting additional items under MyWeb tag ‘confab.yahoo’.

CNET and Chris Masse (on Midas Oracle) provide excellent summaries of the technical content of the event. So I’ll skip any substantive comments (for now) and instead mention a few fun moments:

  • Bo began by staring straight into the camera and giving a shoutout to Chris Masse, the eccentric Frenchman who also happens to be a sharp, tireless, and invaluable (and don’t forget bombastic) chronicler of the prediction markets field via his portal and blog.
  • Todd had the audience laughing with his story of how a prediction market laid bare the uncomfortable truth about an inevitable product delay, to the incredulousness of the product’s manager. (Todd assured us that this was a Microsoft internal product, not a consumer-facing product.)
  • I had the unlucky distinction of being the only speaker to suffer from technical difficulties in trying to present from my own Mac Powerbook instead of the provided Windows laptop. Todd later admitted that he was tempted to make a Windows/Mac quip like “Windows just works”.
  • Adam finished with an Jobsian “one more thing” announcement of their latest effort, worthio, a secret project they’ve been hacking away at nights and weekends even as they operate their startup Inkling at full speed ahead. (Yesterday Adam blogged about the confab.)

Our Yootles currency seems to have caught the public’s imagination more than any of the other various topics I covered in my own talk. (What’s wrong with you folks? You’re not endlessly fascinated with the gory mathematical details of my dynamic parimutuel market mechanism? ;-)) And so a meme is born. The lead on the Yootles project is Daniel Reeves and he is eager to answer questions and hear your feedback.

I enjoyed the confab immensely and it was great to meet so many people: thanks for the kind words from so many of you. Thanks again to the speakers, organizers, media, and attendees. I hope the event was valuable to you. Archive video of the event is available [100k|300k] for those who could not attend in person.

confab.yahoo update

Here is an update on the confab.yahoo on prediction markets happening this Wed Dec 13 at 5:30pm at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale headquarters, Building C, Classroom 5.

  1. We’ve added Stanford b-school professor Eric Zitzewitz as a speaker
  2. We’ll hold an ad-hoc vendor session immediately following the event, tentatively featuring Collective Intellect, HedgeStreet, HSX, Inkling Markets, NewsFutures, and RIMDEX
  3. There will be food!
  4. We’ll be giving away a limited number of copies of Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds
  5. We’re planning to webcast the event at two connection speeds: 100k | 300k

Again, the event is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!