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Baye’s Rule for Population Neuroscience

Analyzing Brain Circuits in Population Neuroscience: A case to be a Bayesian (https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02527) In class, we considered a simple herding experiment in which a group of students chose a marble from a bag one at a time, and then guessed out loud whether the bag was majority red or majority blue. Based on intuition, we […]

Stepping on Giants’ Toes: Google’s Conflict of Interest in Advertising

One of the largest contributors to Google’s success has been its ability to auction off ad slots for related products at the top of search result pages. This has allowed Google to rake in billions of dollars over the past decade and pushed it to the forefront of search engine technology and big data analytics. […]

How Google and Facebook’s New Algorithms Have Changed Digital Strategies

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/03/14/how-google-and-facebooks-new-algorithms-will-change-your-digital-strategy/#ee4c8c3ebdc6 In lecture, we have talked about search engine optimization (SEO) and how companies and small businesses used popular search terms to appear highly in the search results. Large search engine and social media sites, like Google and Facebook, have developed algorithms to specifically match a person’s search word to the most popular search website […]

Youtube’s Recommendation Algorithm

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/youtubes-recommendation-algorithm-has-a-dark-side/ Youtube makes its money through targeted ads on their videos. Youtube wants its users to stay on their site longer so they can watch more videos, making them more money. Youtube influences its users to stay on their site longer by recommending them videos that may pique their interest. Using a specialized algorithm, Youtube […]

Google’s BERT

In class, we have discussed the search industry, particularly with regards to internet search services such as Google. We’ve examined various algorithms behind these services such as the PageRank algorithm, and explored the market pricing for per-click advertising. However, another interesting element of the internet search problem is how to parse user queries. Google has, […]

Auctions on Privacy Protocals

This article, “Secret Auctions with Enigma”, is posted on the official blog of Enigma. Enigma is a secure computation protocol, “where ‘secret nodes’ in our network perform computations over encrypted data,” according to Enigma’s website. And it claims to “secure the decentralized web.” The author, Ainsley Sutherland, talks about the concept of “sealed bid” and […]

Second-Price Auctions in eBay and Amazon

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/00028280260344632 In the essay written by Alvin and Axel, they talk about an application of second-price auction used in eBay and Amazon- two famous online auction sites. In these websites, a bidder submits a reservation price then uses the maximum price to bid for him by proxy. In other words, a bidder submits his reservation […]

Keyword based advertising is “Unfair”

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/business/smallbusiness/as-pay-per-click-ad-costs-rise-small-businesses-search-for-alternatives.html The article “Small Players Seek an Alternative to the Expense of Pay-Per-Click” by Darren Dahl discusses about the issues regarding the pay per click advertisement method that most websites such as Google uses. The article starts by introducing us to an individual named Tom Telford, who wanted to advertise his new business. […]

How Targeted Ads are beneficial all around.

Targeted advertisements are a fairly hot topic in today’s world. With giant companies such as Facebook and Google making a majority of their revenue through advertisements, it makes sense to take a deeper look. The idea behind targeted ads is that a person’s personal information is used to present them with ads that companies think […]

Major FOMO

Source: link In class, we recently learned about information cascades. The basic concept is that instead of trusting our private information, we follow the crowd. For example, if you heard a class is difficult and uninteresting and you want to take another class, but all your friends are taking the difficult class, you reconsider what class […]

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