Machine Learning in Google Ads

Staff - Faculty of Informatics

Date: 21 October 2019 / 15:30 - 17:30

USI Lugano Campus, room SI-006, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)

Speaker:
Marija Mikic, Google (Los Angeles), USA

Abstract:
Google ads power the internet ecosystem. Businesses rely on ads to find their customers. Publishers and creators rely on digital advertising as their source of revenue. Finally ads enable end users to reach internet content for free. In this talk, I will provide a high-level overview of the Google ads system. The talk will focus on different machine learning systems that power Google ads: the challenges these models face, the scale at which they operate, how they evolve, and some of the state-of-the-art techniques they leverage. I will highlight how these models classify internet content, how they decide when and what ads to show, how they help advertisers reach the right audience, and how they help us protect users.

Biography:
Marija Mikic is a Software Engineering Director at Google Los Angeles and site lead for Google Los Angeles, where she has been employed since 2004. Her teams work on search, display, video/YouTube, and shopping ads quality.  She received her Ph.D. in 2004 in Software Engineering from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California.  She has been on the organizing and/or program committees of ICSE 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. She was the program co-chair of the first International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2017). Her interests are in large-scale distributed systems, human computation, and machine learning/evolution.

Host: Prof. Antonio Carzaniga