EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Nils Pohlmann
dblp:134/4008
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
0since 2021 · last 2013
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Software engineering, system software, and programming languages
1 paper |
Empirical software engineering · 100% | |
| Computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing, and storage systems
1 paper |
Cloud and datacenter computing · 100% |
Topics — the 2 heaviest of 3, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Empirical software engineering › controlled experiment › online controlled experiments
a/b testing |
0.2 | 1 | 2013 | Online controlled experiments at large scale · KDD 2013 |
Empirical software engineering › controlled experiment
online controlled experiments |
0.2 | 1 | 2013 | Online controlled experiments at large scale · KDD 2013 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
controlled experiment · 0.3alerting · 0.3
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Online controlled experiments at large scaleabstractWeb-facing companies, including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, Google, Groupon, Intuit, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, Shop Direct, StumbleUpon, Yahoo, and Zynga use online controlled experiments to guide product development and accelerate innovation. At Microsoft's Bing, the use of controlled experiments has grown exponentially over time, with over 200 concurrent experiments now running on any given day. Running experiments at large scale requires addressing multiple challenges in three areas: cultural/organizational, engineering, and trustworthiness. On the cultural and organizational front, the larger organization needs to learn the reasons for running controlled experiments and the tradeoffs between controlled experiments and other methods of evaluating ideas. We discuss why negative experiments, which degrade the user experience short term, should be run, given the learning value and long-term benefits. On the engineering side, we architected a highly scalable system, able to handle data at massive scale: hundreds of concurrent experiments, each containing millions of users. Classical testing and debugging techniques no longer apply when there are billions of live variants of the site, so alerts are used to identify issues rather than relying on heavy up-front testing. On the trustworthiness front, we have a high occurrence of false positives that we address, and we alert experimenters to statistical interactions between experiments. The Bing Experimentation System is credited with having accelerated innovation and increased annual revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars, by allowing us to find and focus on key ideas evaluated through thousands of controlled experiments. A 1% improvement to revenue equals more than $10M annually in the US, yet many ideas impact key metrics by 1% and are not well estimated a-priori. The system has also identified many negative features that we avoided deploying, despite key stakeholders' early excitement, saving us similar large amounts. Ron Kohavi, Alex Deng, Brian Frasca, Toby Walker, Ya Xu, Nils Pohlmann |
KDD | 6 |