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Geof Becker                          
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gbecker@andrew.cmu.edu

Tepper School Hosts Research Chiefs From eBay, Google,
Yahoo! For "Hurdles to eBusiness" Conference

Conference Sponsored by Carnegie Bosch Institute
Spotlights Intersection of Business, Technology

PITTSBURGH — Top researchers from three of the most influential companies in the online world will speak at the "Hurdles to e-Business" conference, Oct. 11 at Carnegie Mellon University. Sponsored by the Carnegie Bosch Institute for Applied Studies in International Management at the Tepper School of Business, the conference brings together research chiefs from eBay, Google and Yahoo! to candidly discuss issues such as click fraud and long-tail marketing. 

The conference, with morning sessions free and open to the public, will be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in McConomy Auditorium in the University Center.

"While business over the Internet has grown tremendously, and has become a disruptive force in business overall, it is perhaps not still at its full potential," said conference co-organizer R. Ravi, the Carnegie Bosch Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science at the Tepper School.  "This conference will ask people in the front lines how online business might continue to evolve and discuss how problems in the online world might be framed as interesting academic research."

Key conference times, participants and topics are:

•    9:45 a.m.       Neel Sundaresan, senior director and head of Research Labs at eBay,
                           "Community Computing: Tackling the Finding Challenge by its Long Tail;"
•    10:45 a.m.      Kourosh Gharachorloo, traffic quality team, Google, 
                           "Click Fraud - Anecdotes from the Frontline;"
•    12 p.m.           Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research,
                           "The Web Economy and Its Relevance to the Intersection of Computer Science Economics."

After the public sessions, the attendees and academic researchers will meet privately in the afternoon to talk in more detail about developing research inquiries from the business problems presented earlier. For more information and to obtain a summary of the afternoon session, please register using the conference Web site, http://wpweb2.tepper.cmu.edu/rlang/cbi/index.html.

The Carnegie Bosch Institute frequently hosts conferences, workshops and executive programs in which business people and academics exchange views and perspectives on timely management issues. For more information, please visit the CBI Web site at http://cbi.tepper.cmu.edu/.