Niklas Karlsson
Yahoo's Demand Side Platform
Seminar Information
Programmatic advertising is at the heart of the business for companies such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. A Demand Side Platform is a particular business model for programmatic advertising, and its goal is to optimally spend an advertising budget. The optimization is challenging due to an underlying high-dimensional, nonlinear, time-varying, dynamic, and stochastic plant. In this talk we introduce the optimization problem and demonstrate how techniques from control engineering can be used to analyze and solve the problem. The problem is decomposed into lower-dimensional sub problems and one of these problems is solved with the help of an adaptive feedback control system. We analyze the dynamics and derive stability conditions for the controller. The goal is for the audience to leave with an appreciation of the many open, interesting, and challenging feedback control problems available in programmatic advertising.
Dr. Niklas Karlsson is Chief Scientist and Vice President of R&D for Yahoo's Demand Side Platform, where he creates and implements the research vision around feedback control and artificial intelligence for online advertising. He received the M.S. degree in engineering physics from Lund University in 1995, and the M.A. degree in statistics and applied probability and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering (with a specialization in control theory, dynamic systems, and robotics) from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1997 and 2002, respectively. He also graduated from the Stanford Executive Program in 2017. He joined Evolution Robotics in Pasadena, California, in 2002, where he was the principal investigator of navigation and control algorithms. During his tenure at Evolution Robotics, he invented, among other things, the vSLAM technology, which is now used as the brain of the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner by iRobot. In 2005, he joined Advertising.com. He joined Yahoo by way of acquisition. Karlsson is the inventor of 44 issued patents in the areas of mobile autonomous robotics and online advertising; he 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 Yahoo in 2017 (the highest technology/science recognition within the company). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.