Georgios Zervas, Computer Science Department, Yale University

Georgios Zervas

I am a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University working with Joan Feigenbaum, and an Affiliate at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University. I completed my PhD in 2011 in Computer Science at Boston University under the supervision of John Byers and Michael Mitzenmacher (from Harvard).

I am broadly interested in problems lying in the intersection of computer science and economics. A lot of my work has focused on large scale empirical studies of internet markets. I am interested in both the descriptive analysis of electronic commerce systems to establish basic facts about their operation, as well as the role of the economic information produced in social networks, reputation, and trust systems in shaping those markets.

Email: To contact me the old-fashioned way prepend the suffix of the URL above to @cs.yale.edu

Professional activities: I am on the Program Committee of WWW 2013. I was on the PC of WSDM 2013, and EC 2012.

Selected papers

The Groupon Effect on Yelp Ratings: A Root Cause Analysis [arXiv]
John Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher, Georgios Zervas
In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC) 2012

Also, to be presented at the 8th Symposium on Statistical Challenges in Electronic Commerce Research (SCECR) 2012

Media coverage
NPR's Morning Edition featured a piece on our work on Friday, July 6. The Huffington Post also covered our work. The discussion on Hacker News is interesting.
Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramiﬁcations [arXiv] [Dataset]
John Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher, Georgios Zervas
In Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2012
Media coverage
Our work has received wide media coverage on various newspapers, magazines, and blogs among which The New York Times, Time magazine, BU Today, the MIT Technology Review, The Atlantic, The Wall St. Journal, The CS Monitor, and more.
John Byers was invited to discuss our work on WBUR 90.9, and Bloomberg TV.
A little help for Yelp: During our work we discovered, and helped Yelp fix a privacy leak. See the blog post by Yelp's engineering team which explains in detail what happened.
Information Asymmetries in Pay-Per-Bid Auctions: How Swoopo Makes Bank
John Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher, Georgios Zervas
In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC) 2010
[PDF (Shorter EC version)] [PDF (Extended arXiv version)] [Dataset]
Adaptive Weighing Designs for Keyword Value Computation [PDF]
John Byers, Michael Mitzenmacher, Georgios Zervas
In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2010

Complete list of publications →

Work in progress

The Evolving Quality of Groupon Deals [PDF]
Georgios Zervas

Brief bio

2011 to date

Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University
Affiliate at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS), Harvard University

2006 to date

Research Scientist, CogoLabs Inc.

2005—2011

PhD, Computer Science, Boston University.
Thesis: Data-Driven Analysis of Electronic Commerce Systems

2000—2005

I ran Perlfect Solutions providing consulting and programming services

1999—2000

London College of Communication, University of the Arts
MA Interactive Media
Thesis: Automatic Website Generation Using Genetic Algorithms

1998—1999

Imperial College, University of London
MSc Advanced Computing, Thesis: Advanced Clustering Algorithms, supervised by Stefan Rueger

1995—1998

Imperial College, University of London
BEng Computing
Thesis: Object Linking and Embedding for Linux, supervised by Steffen van Bakel