Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

• Social Information Networks and Privacy

  Online Social networks provide a new way of accessing and collectively treating information. Their efficiency is critically predicated on the quality of information provided, the ability of users to assess such quality, and to connect to like-minded users to exchange useful content.

  To improve this efficiency, we develop mechanisms for assessing users’ expertise and recommending suitable content. We further develop algorithms for identifying latent user communities and recommending potential contacts to users.

• Machine Learning and Big Data

  Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems constitute a generic benchmark model for learning to make sequential decisions under uncertainty. They capture the trade-off between exploring decisions to learn the statistical properties of the corresponding rewards, and exploiting decisions that have generated the highest rewards so far. In this project, we aim at investigating bandit problems with a large set of available decisions, with structured rewards. The project addresses bandit problems with known and unknown structure, and targets specific applications in online advertising, recommendation and ranking systems.