Jun 12, 2009 - 3:00-5:00pm
Grand Ballroom,
The Leela, Bangalore.
The Automated Economy
David Pennock, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research.
Abstract
Software algorithms are taking over rote tasks from people throughout the economy, from advertising to finance, from insurance to sourcing.
Computer programs go beyond mimicking people: they crunch through vast seas of data and billions of possibilities to find solutions that may be unambiguously better for everyone involved. Pennock focusses on examples from advertising and finance and describes how almost every aspect of advertising is being automated, including its sale, delivery, and measurement, starting with web search advertising and expanding into display, video, and mobile advertising. The prospects of next generation financial exchanges that allow traders to create customized mutual funds on the fly by bundling together stock trades, or to place complex bets contingent on multiple outcomes, including prediction markets designed specifically for gathering and disseminating information is deftly covered by Pennock.
David Pennock is a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in New York City, where he leads a group focused on algorithmic economics.
Pennock's job is to dream up technologies that are disruptive and revolutionary, either commercially, scientifically, or both. He has over fifty academic publications relating to electronic commerce and the web, including papers in PNAS, Science, IEEE Computer, Theoretical Computer Science, AAAI, EC, and WWW. He has given over thirty talks and authored one patent and ten patent applications. In 2005, he was named to MIT Technology Review's list of 35 top technology innovators under age 35 having the potential to profoundly impact the world. Pennock is at the forefront of a growing vanguard of computer scientists and economists who are working together to investigate the role of computation in economic theory and to design and build the marketplaces of the digital age. One of his primary areas of expertise is the design and analysis of prediction markets.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Pennock worked at NEC Research and Microsoft Research, and served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University. Pennock serves on numerous organizing, program, and editorial committees for workshops, conferences, and journals. He received a B.S. in Physics from Duke University (magna cum laude), an M.S. in Computer Science from Duke, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. Reports of Pennock's research have appeared in Time, Discover, New Scientist, CNN, the Economist, and the New York Times.
