Events Calendar

AI SEMINAR

Speaker: Pascal Van Hentenryck, National ICT Australia (NICTA)

Talk Title: Measuring and Optimizing Cultural Markets

Abstract: Social influence has been shown to create significant unpredictability
in cultural markets, providing one potential explanation why experts
routinely fail at predicting commercial success of cultural
products. To counteract the difficulty of making accurate predictions,
``measure and react'' strategies have been advocated but finding a
concrete strategy that scales for very large markets has remained
elusive so far. Here we propose a ``measure and optimize'' strategy
that uses product quality, appeal, and social influence to maximize
expected profits in the market. Computational experiments show that
our ``measure and optimize'' strategy can leverage social influence to
produce significant performance benefits for the market. Our
theoretical analysis also proves that a ``measure and optimize''
strategy with social influence outperforms in expectation any
``measure and react'' strategy not displaying social information. In
other words, we show for the first time that dynamically showing
consumers positive social information increases the expected
performance of the seller in cultural markets, when using a ``measure
and optimize'' strategy.

Biography: Pascal Van Hentenryck leads the Optimisation Research Group (about 75
people) at National ICT Australia (NICTA). He also holds a
Vice-Chancellor Strategic Chair in data-intensive computing at the
Australian National University. Van Hentenryck is the recipient of
two honorary degrees and a fellow of the Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He was awarded the 2002
INFORMS ICS Award for research excellence in operations research and
compute science, the 2006 ACP Award for research excellence in
constraint programming, the 2010-2011 Philip J. Bray Award for
Teaching Excellence at Brown University, and was the 2013 IFORS
Distinguished speaker. Van Hentenryck is the author of five MIT Press
books and has developed a number of innovative optimisation systems
that are widely used in academia and industry.

Host: Kristina Lerman

More Info: TBA

Webcast: TBA

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room

WebCast Link: TBA

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kary LAU

Event Link: TBA