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Text Box: For every user search web search engines determine relevant advertisements, called "Sponsored Links", and prices for them that the advertiser has to pay if the ad is clicked on. Usually the assignment and pricing is done based on an auction, called sponsored search auction. Thus hundreds of millions of sponsored search auctions are performed every day. More formally in sponsored search auctions a set of items, namely the ad positions on the search result page, have to be assigned prices and a set of advertisers has to be assigned to these items so that at the determined prices the advertisers are envy-free. To determine envy-freeness each advertiser has a utility function for each item that depends solely on its price. These utility functions can be arbitrary functions in the price and thus this problem is a generalization of the well-known assignment problem. In this talk I will present the state of the art in solving sponsored search auctions and also show how the problem fits into the larger space of research questions studied traditionally by economists.

Text Box: The GERARD SALTON Lecture Series

Text Box: 4:15 pm B17 Upson Hall Reception - 4th Floor Atrium at 3:45pm

Monika Henzinger

University of Vienna, Austria

Monika Henzinger received her PhD in 1994 from Princeton University and joined the Computer Science Department at Cornell University as assistant professor in the same year. In 1996 she became a member of technical staff at the Systems Research Center of Digital Equipment Corporation. A few years later she joined Google as the Director of Research and in 2005 she became a faculty member at the School of Computer & Communication Sciences of EPFL (Switzerland), heading the Laboratory of Theory and Applications of Algorithms. Since fall 2009 she is a full professor of Computer Science at the University of Vienna, Austria. Dr. Henzinger is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an European Young Investigator Award, and a Top 25 Women on the Web Award. She is also a member of the Junge Kurie of the Austrian Academy of Science.

Text Box: Sponsored Search Auctions or How Web Search Engines Make Money

Gerard Salton (1927- 1995) A towering figure in the field of information retrieval, Gerard Salton synthesized ideas from mathematics, statistics, and natural language processing to create a scientific basis for extracting semantics from word frequency. The impact of his contributions is profound - five textbooks, over 150 research papers, and dozens of Ph.D. students. The modern computer science and information science research scene, with its terabyte databases, Web, and related technologies, owes a great deal to Gerry's pioneering efforts.

This lecture series honors our former colleague with speakers who similarly are innovators in their fields.