“Are People Basically Good?” – An Interweaving Story of Trust, Commerce, and Technology at the Long Tail

Abstract

A Commerce website was born more than fourteen years ago just about the time the Internet was taking off. It boldly brought buyers and sellers together with the limited tools and technologies available then. It helped them conduct commerce without physically meeting each other but trusting each other with goods and money. A model for trust and social network was facilitated by technology through online commerce. The phenomenal growth and evolution of this site called eBay is filled with stories of man meets machine. In this talk we will discuss technical, economic, and social aspects of these stories at the “Long Tail” – a term that has become synonymous with eBay.

Bio

Neel Sundaresan is the head of eBay Research Labs and a Senior Director. His current areas of research interest includes Social and Incentive Networks, Trust and Reputation Systems, Machine Learning as applied to Recommender systems, Classification, Ontology, and Search. He joined eBay in 2005 as a Distinguished Research Scientist. Prior to joining eBay was a founder and CTO of a startup focused on multi-attribute fuzzy search and network CRM. Prior to this he was the head of the eMerging Internet Technologies group at the IBM Research Center. There he built the first XML-based Search Engine. He was one of the early leaders in building XML technologies including schema-aware compression algorithms, application component generators and pattern-match systems and compilers. He built the first RDF reference implementation as a W3C standard recommendation. He led research work in other areas like domain specific search engines, multi-modal interfaces and assistive technologies, semantic transcoding, web mining, query systems, and classification for semi-structured data. Prior to this he worked on C++ compiler and runtime systems for massively parallel machines and for shared memory systems and also on retargetable compilers, program translators and generators. He has over 40 research publications and several patents to his credit. He has been a frequent speaker at several national and international technology conferences. He has advised 2 PhD and several masters dissertations. He has a degree in mathematics and a masters in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, and a PhD in computer science from Indiana University, Bloomington. His dissertation was on Modeling Control and Dynamic Data Parallelism in Object-Oriented Languages.

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