Category: english

Non-linear growth of value in platform business

The value of aggregation in ad business (and probably in most other verticals, too) is that 1 impression would have zero value, i.e., no advertiser wants to pay. 10 impressions also have zero value, so do 100 impressions. But when we get to hundreds of thousands to millions, all of a sudden the value spikes […]

About academic competition and network effects

It’s extremely hard for a small research team to compete against huge labs. It’s a question of network effects; the huge labs have the critical mass of funding, collaborators, momentum, and publication pull to attract the best talent, whether the brightest PhD students or the best post-docs. The rest are left with the “scraps”. Seems […]

A New Blog on Customer Segmentation

Hi! Our team has started a new blog about customer segmentation. The blog reports our research progress on new customer segmentation algorithms and summarizes a lot of the previous work on customer segmentation. You can access the blog at: https://quecst.qcri.org/blog/

Research on Persona Analytics

This year (2021), we have managed to publish two research papers that I consider important milestones in persona analytics research. They are listed below. Jung, S., Salminen, J., & Jansen, B. J. (2021). Persona Analytics: Implementing Mouse-tracking for an Interactive Persona System. Extended Abstracts of ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI EA ’21. […]

Algorithms that describe a researcher’s mind

Algorithms that describe a researcher’s mind: (a) Work on the paper “closest to publication”. => downside: can reduce the willingness to solve difficult problems because they are farther from publication (b) Always switch to more interesting topic, when you see one. => downside: you’ll never get anything published (but upside can be that you learn […]

5 Trends of Coronavirus and the Economy

Outlining five trends I’m observing at the moment. NB: These are my personal opinions, mostly based on business news coming out and social media sentiments of people I’m following. I: Monetary policy of lowering interest rates and “printing money” by buying bonds and stocks by central banks has a limited effect on alleviating the financial […]