Spring ’19 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
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Niklas Karlsson,
Verizon Media
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Abstract
Programmatic advertising is at the heart of the business model for companies such as Google, Facebook, and Verizon Media. A Demand Side Platform is a particular business model for programmatic advertising, and its goal is to manage an advertiser's advertisement budget optimally. The optimization is challenging due to an underlying high-dimensional, nonlinear, time-varying, dynamic, and stochastic process.
In this talk we first show how the optimization problem can be rewritten as a feedback control problem. Indeed, feedback control is a critical component of online advertising. We thereafter propose a control system that maximizes the return on investment for an advertiser and paces the budget delivery. The control system consists of an integral controller with periodic feedforward compensation of the set-point and persistent excitation. The closed loop system is a nonlinear, periodic dynamical system with non-additive noise. We analyze the dynamics and derive stability conditions for the controller. We hope to convince the audience there are many interesting and challenging research problems to pursue in programmatic advertising for anyone interested in feedback control or dynamical systems.
Biosketch
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 break-through 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 29 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).