In February of 2006, Click Forensics was just getting off the ground. We recognized the problem of click fraud was a big problem and that building a solution would be tough technical challenge. We decided to bring in an expert in the field of data mining and anomaly detection in clickstream analysis. That expert was Dr. Alex Tuzhilin. Alex spent the day with us at our offices in San Antonio and provided us a roadmap for the evolution of our approach to indentifying invalid traffic.
His contribution to us at that point was essential and provided tremendous insight. After reviewing our approach he commented,
"Click Forensics has good data and this is a source of their advantage over the search engines. To work with them to refine the scoring methodology to improve accuracy. Their approach is to incorporate as much data as possible to improve accuracy. The search providers simply don’t have enough data to have the most accurate approach."Shortly after Alex’s visit to Texas, a call from the lead attorney representing Lane’s Gifts in their lawsuit against Google. He said, "just hired your Ph.D!" The judge in that case had mandated that an outside consultant review Google’s click fraud detection methods and publish a paper on the efficacy. Alex spent many weeks at Google and wrote an insightful paper detailing their approach, ultimately describing it as "reasonable". The Lane’s Gift case was settled and Alex returned to his role as a professor at NYU.
Today we are thrilled to announce that Dr. Tuzhilin has joined the Click Forensics Advisory Board. Few individuals have had more real-world and academic experience in the measurement of online traffic quality and its effect on advertisers. His work has helped move the industry toward standards and cooperation. After visiting us in Austin a few weeks ago and meeting with our technology team, Alex said,
"Having firsthand experience reviewing the state of the art in ad network traffic management, I was impressed with the level of technical sophistication the team exhibits and I was impressed with the directions they are going, Click Forensics has played a leadership role in helping the online advertising community to monitor quality of clicks on ads, including identification of invalid clicks. Look forward to continuing to work with the team.
"In addition to Dr. Tuzhilin, we have also added Dr. William Wright, the Chief Scientist at Paypal. Dr.Wright, a Ph.D. in cognitive science, is an artificial intelligence expert who has built numerous analytical and predictive systems over the past twenty years, including the Falcon Credit Card Fraud Detection System at HNC, the Advanced Fraud Screen system at CyberSource, and numerous adversarial modeling systems for the U.S. military. After spending time with our team, William concluded,
"Click Forensics has built a strong team of developers using very advanced machine learning and data mining techniques to detect fraud and measure traffic quality, they are pioneering a new area of fraud detection and I’m finding it satisfying to work closely with them on leveraging lessons from my past experience combating credit card and banking fraud.
"One out of every five employees at Click Forensics holds a Ph.D. Adding the expertise of Alex and William dramatically enhances our ability to meet our goal of providing the state of the art approach to traffic quality management. Appreciate their contributions and look forward to benefiting from their knowledge in the future.
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