UCL-CS PhD students win first global RTB (Real-Time Bidding) algorithm competition

Media Futures Phd Students Weinan Zhang and Shuai Yuan have won the first global RTB bidding algorithm competition, which was organised by iPinYou, the largest real-time advertising platform in China.  In this season, data scientists from eight countries, including China, USA, UK, India and France, have participated in the competition and made over 2000 submissions.

The IPinYou global RTB (Real-Time Bidding, see here for more details) algorithm competition kicked off on April 1, 2013 and lasted for 9 months. The purpose of this competition is to further improve the performance of DSP bidding algorithm, stimulate the interest of research and development of DSP bidding algorithms in the whole data science research community, and speed up the growth of RTB-enabled display advertising ecosystem.

There are three Milestone Prizes and one Grand Prize (RMB 1,000,000) for the DSP bidding competition. The UCL team were the third position in the second Milestone, and won the last Milestone, both in the offline stage and online stage. The algorithm developed by the UCL team was a great success. It outperformed the second over 30% in live industry settings. Further information is available on the official competition website.

Our winners are expected to go to Beijing to attend the award ceremony in March.