The University of Luxembourg’s (Uni.Lu) Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) and OLA Mobile have announced the signature of a new partnership agreement, which will initiate a long-term strategic collaboration on research into self-learning algorithms, which will enable improved targeted marketing of mobile applications, or apps.
OLA Mobile provides services in the commercialisation of apps. Said company CEO, Antoine Moreau, “Indeed this expertise [in research] is very important for us. We are acting in the rapid developing area of mobile games with tremendous economic potential. Here, a cooperation with one of Europe’s leading ICT research institutes is extremely valuable.”
Director of the SnT, Prof. Björn Ottersten, added, “I’m very happy about our new partnership with OLA Mobile. It shows that through our expertise the SnT increasingly attracts R&D investments in Luxembourg.”
The business model of many apps is based on advertising. Users get a game or a service, such as a navigation service, for free. In turn, the app producers use these apps as an advertising platform: The users are shown ads at regular intervals.
The purchasing time and customer-specific profile are the keys. The more valuable advertising times warrant a higher price demand from the app developer.
For the most part, ads appear essentially randomly. In some circumstances, it is known whether the user is male or female and what applications are used by preference. However, there is much more data that could be used, under strict observation of privacy, to make advertising more customer-specific and thereby also less intrusive. For instance, the time of day, the gaming habits with the app (for example frequent or irregular use), the location, or the user’s purchase history could deliver valuable indications as to what products the user is interested in.
Dr. Radu State, who will be coordinating the joint-project, explained: “This data must be processed in large quantities and in real-time, and the algorithm must learn to understand the user ever better and to make the advertising messages increasingly customer-specific.”
Together, SnT and OLA mobile will develop the algorithms in that direction – so that they can be used as soon as possible in OLA Mobile’s products.
Prof. Dr. Thomas Engel, Vice-Director of SnT and Head of the SnT NetLab, in which the cooperation with OLA Mobile is taking place, described SnT’s benefit from the joint research and development work with OLA Mobile: “We have the opportunity here to advance and verify our development on real data. That is far more realistic, and so far more relevant, than if we were to work with data that was generated artificially for a research project.”
Consumer protection also benefits from this, Prof. Dr. Engel assured: “The algorithms so far used for these purposes are strictly confidential. That will also be the case for the codes that OLA Mobile ultimately uses. As is usual in public research, however, we will publish the fundamental insights that we generate in this collaboration in scientific journals. This promotes greater transparency.”
