February
07
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Why did Google dig deep into its pockets to buy DeepMind?
Will DeepMind terminate poor display advertising?
The merger of digital and physical worlds appears to have drawn a little closer when Google bought into the the UK start-up DeepMind, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence company founded by 37-year-old neuroscientist Demis Hassabis and fellow scientists, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.
DeepMind was founded to combine the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience in an effort to develop powerful general-purpose learning algorithms for e-commerce and games. It is destined to have a significant effect on computational advertising.
The rise of computational advertising
According to Stanford University, Computational Advertising is an emerging scientific sub-discipline focused on large scale search and text analysis, information retrieval, statistical modeling, machine learning, classification, optimization, and microeconomics. That’s that sorted then.
The focus of computational advertising is to find the “best match” between a given user in a given context and a suitable advertisement. The number of potential advertisements might be in the billions. The solution to narrowing down the options to increase the relevance of display advertising in any given context provides the scientific and technical foundations for the $20 billion online advertising industry which, let’s face it, has hardly covered itself in glory in terms of delivering ROI for advertisers. The fact is, you are still more likely to graduate from Navy SEAL school than click on an ad. Lets hope DeepMind lends a helping hand in the ad department. Sooner or later, the display Ad Networks and Exchanges will have to start making up for lost ground and the fortunes owners have earned for relatively little effect.
