Indiantelevision.com Team

(16 October 2007 3:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Online advertising company Komli has announced the launch of India’s first ever algoGod contest.

The algoGod contest seeks to crown one expert as the "Algorithms God." The company wants every contestant to solve a common algorithms problem, and whoever is best will receive the algoGod prize.

Komli says that online advertising is rife with opportunity with complex algorithms based on cutting edge topics such as machine learning, data mining, graph theory amongst others.

Online advertising, Komli says, is growing at a fast pace, and the number of variables affecting the performance of an online ad has been growing at an even faster pace. Komli is devising methods for maximising the yield of online advertising using advanced statistical machine learning methods over large-scale systems. This is a very interesting and complex algorithm problem, requiring multivariate statistical analysis, extensive data mining and machine learning techniques.

Komli itself is looking for machine learning, algorithm, and statistical engineering experts to develop innovative approaches to maximising the yield of online advertising systems.

The prize winner, in addition to winning "national bragging rights", will earn Rs 2 lakhs. Participants can sign up at http://www.komli.com/algogod .

Komli is currently using a set of algorithms for maximising the yield of online ads. These algorithms are collectively called Yin-Yang.

There are a lot of alternative approaches to how Yin-Yang works that have yet to be tried. The company is interested in determining if any of these alternative approaches can beat Yin-Yang by making better predictions.

Getting better predictions means making more money for publishers and ad networks, which would make a big difference to our customers and our business.

Komli will provide participants with anonymous ad impression data and a prediction accuracy bar that is 50 per cent better than what Yin-Yang can do on the same training data set. Participants’ solutions will also be judged by 'Time complexity' and 'Space complexity'.