Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Robert Kleinberg (Cornell University)

Speaker: Robert Kleinberg, Cornell University

Talk Title: Multi-Armed Bandits and the Web

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: For more than fifty years, the multi-armed bandit problem has been the predominant theoretical model for investigating how to make the most efficient use of limited experimentation resources for optimization. In the past decade, the emergence of the Web as a platform for automated experimentation at a massive scale has inspired a variety of new opportunities and challenges in this area. I will survey some new algorithms that have been developed to address these challenges. Inspired by applications to e-commerce, crowdsourcing, Web search, and advertising, the algorithms touch on broader issues in experimental design: how to design nearly optimal experimentation policies in the presence of supply limits, how to make the best use of feedback in the form of relative preference judgments, and how to mitigate the misalignment of incentives between agents who perform experiments and a principal who benefits from observing the resulting outcomes.

Biography: Robert Kleinberg is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research studies the design and analysis of algorithms, and their applications to electronic commerce, networking, information retrieval, and other areas. Prior to receiving his doctorate from MIT in 2005, Kleinberg spent three years at Akamai Technologies, where he assisted in designing the world's largest Internet Content Delivery Network. He is the recipient of a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER Award.

Host: David Kempe

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair