Building Data Infrastructures for Adaptive Digital Advertising

The success of digital advertising increasingly depends on personalization systems that can quickly adapt to individual user behavior. One of the main challenges for advertising platforms is striking the right balance between personalization and user experience. When ads become repetitive or irrelevant, users may develop banner blindness, experience ad fatigue, and reduce their engagement with the platform.
 
This research project focuses on designing the data infrastructures that make such adaptive personalization possible. The primary goal is to build the technical foundations that enable researchers to study user behavior in detail. This involves tracking how often users see ads, how they interact with them and how their engagement evolves over time. The key challenge lies in developing data pipelines that capture these behaviors accurately and process them in real time, while ensuring consistency, scalability and usability for analysis.
 
Selected students will contribute to an end-to-end project, gaining hands-on experience in building the foundations of a real-world personalization system and work on systems that connect raw user activity to structured datasets for research, This project offers an interdisciplinary environment that combines academic research with industry practices, giving students exposure to both research methods and system development.
 
Research Objectives

• Data Collection Frameworks: Design and implement methods for collecting detailed user and ad interaction data.
• Backend Systems: Develop reliable and scalable infrastructures for real-time data processing.
• Frontend Tracking: Explore seamless techniques for capturing user interactions across different interfaces.

Knowledge of frontend and/or backend development is mandatory, also previous projects are a big plus. For further information about the project, you may contact inanc.arin@sabanciuniv.edu.