EVENT

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Talk on "Can Ad-supported Online Publishing Survive Privacy Regulations and Ad-Blockers?" by Prof. Cristian Borcea from New Jersey Institute of Technology

We are pleased to inform you about the upcoming seminar by Prof. Cristian Borcea
from New Jersey Institute of Technology titled:"Can Ad-supported Online Publishing Survive Privacy Regulations and Ad-Blockers?" Everyone interested is cordially invited to attend!

Title:

Can Ad-supported Online Publishing Survive Privacy Regulations and Ad-Blockers?

Abstract:

Since our society receives most of its information online, a high-quality online press plays a crucial role in democracy, especially in light of mounting volumes of fake news and disinformation. Most of us got used to reading online press for free, and this is made possible by online advertisement revenue. However, in the recent years two separate trends have started to endanger this publishing model: the regulations introduced by governments across the world, such as GDPR in Europe, to protect the user privacy, and the ad-blocker tools installed in the browsers to remove the annoyance caused by ads. Both trends result in significant revenue loss for publishers and may lead to pay walls, under which users need to pay to read high-quality content, or even the disappearance of local or niche publishers.
The main question that we address in this talk is how to balance ad revenue, user privacy, and user experience on ad-supported publishing websites. To address this question, we collaborated with major international publishers in the past ten years for a comprehensive study of ad-supported online publishing. The talk will cover our findings and solutions in terms of GDPR [non-]compliance and the need for better privacy regulations, distributed machine learning techniques that allow targeted advertisement while protecting user privacy, personalized dynamic counter ad-blocking using deep learning to avoid negative long-term effects of forcing users to disable ad-blockers, and algorithms for optimized publisher participation in real-time auctions for ad placement on websites.

Speaker Bio:

Cristian Borcea is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He also holds a Visiting Professor appointment at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include mobile computing & sensing; vehicular computing & networks; cloud & distributed systems; and computational advertising & online privacy. His current projects focus on federated learning and privacy. His recent research has been funded by NSF.

AT&T, and Qualcomm. More information: https://cs.njit.edu/~borcea/