Engineering and Computer Science Receives Gift

The gift will allow the College to develop and establish curriculum, facilitate laboratory improvements, and provide an annual award to the top Bidtellect Laboratory researcher.

From left, Hill (Xingquan) Zhu, Ph.D., FAU associate professor; Nurgun Erdol, Ph.D., chair of FAU's Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering & Computer Science; Mohammad Ilyas, Ph.D., dean of FAU's College of Engineering and Computer Science; Jeremy Kayne, chief technology officer of Bidtellect, Inc.; Kris Kalish, director of optimization at Bidtellect, Inc.; and Tamsyn Carey, director of development and outreach for FAU's College of Engineering and Computer Science.

By lisa metcalf | 1/26/2016

Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science has received a $300,000 gift from Bidtellect, a global leader in native advertising technologies and solutions. The gift will allow the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (CEECS) to engage in research, develop and establish curriculum, facilitate laboratory improvements, fund research assistantships and provide an annual award to the top Bidtellect Laboratory researcher. A laboratory in the Engineering East building on FAU's Boca Raton campus will also be named the "Bidtellect Laboratory."

"This generous gift from Bidtellect enforces the mission of the College of Engineering and Computer Science to offer innovative educational experiences to its students alongside our faculty researchers," said Mohammad Ilyas, Ph.D., dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science. "I am proud of the partnership we've formed with Bidtellect and look forward to working together with them to make a difference in today's ever-evolving world."

The Bidtellect Laboratory will be an incubator to support big data analytics and digital advertising research, as well as serve as an educational platform. Students will learn the fundamentals of real-time-bidding and be exposed to billions of programmatic transactions on a daily basis. They will learn and apply big-data technologies such as Hadoop, Kafka and Spark to build predictive models on large data sets and optimize results via real-time data streams. Bidding strategies and algorithms will be developed and tested that must support a sub 20ms execution. This will further challenge researchers and students to design new data mining and machine learning techniques.

Bidtellect has committed to not only provide guidance and access to data, but will also help deploy algorithms on their exchange. This will be particularly gratifying to students as they will have almost immediate validation of algorithm performance on a large scale, commercial platform.

"In this partnership, FAU research team of graduate students and faculty led by Dr. Xingqua (Hill) Zhu, an associate professor in the CEECS department, will become an extension of Bidtellect's optimization team. Together we will solve real world advertising technology challenges and develop the next generation of talent via a revolutionary computational advertising curriculum," said Lon Otremba, chief executive officer of Bidtellect. "As far as we know, this is an ad tech industry first: bringing together academia and commercial development teams to develop and bring to market the next several generations of optimization technologies for Native Advertising."

Launched in 2013, the Bidtellect platform – built from the ground up to accommodate the unique challenges associated with delivery of targeted Native ads across all devices and in all formats – offers advertisers, agencies and media companies a unique and powerful toolset for Native ad planning, buying, selling and overall management on a single platform.

For more information about the Bidtellect Laboratory or partnering with the FAU Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, email ceecs@fau.edu.

-FAU-