Larisa Adamyan, Kirill Efimov and Evgeny Bakulin figured out how to use artificial intelligence in assessing the effectiveness of offline advertising. The accuracy of the analysis is 95%, entrepreneurs say. Their startup Expanenta can work with radio and television commercials, booklets, conferences and other types of advertising.

Adamyan and Efimov met while studying at MIPT, after which both continued to engage in science in graduate school at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Larisa is now in the final stages of obtaining her doctorate, she and Efimov have a common scientific advisor - Professor Vladimir Spokoiny (in addition to the Berlin university, he also teaches at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow State University and Skoltech). “And Evgeniy is Kirill’s half-brother,” says Adamyan. “He brings business management skills to our team.”

Three years ago, the partners decided to put their own algorithm into practice. The scientific developments of Expanenta’s founders were related to big data, and they saw a niche for monetizing it in the offline advertising analysis market. The implementation did not require any costs: the project used publicly available machine learning software libraries and the intellectual background of the founders.

Evgeny Bakulin (Photo: Expanenta)

It is based on a new clustering algorithm. This is “a multidimensional procedure that combines disparate data into homogeneous groups,” Adamyan explains in an interview with RBC magazine. Scientific articles devoted to the work are available in the public domain, for example in the Google Scholar database. The first prototype of the Expanenta system took four months to create. We worked on the project in parallel with our studies and scientific work.

Black hole assessment

Before launching, Expanenta explored the offline advertising market in Germany through cold calling and print advertising. “It turned out that there is practically no understanding in business that such measurements are possible in principle,” says Adamyan. In her opinion, the key difference between offline and online is the impossibility of tracking the correlation between an advertising campaign and traffic to the site to which the campaign is linked; it is impossible to track every click. “This is the problem we are solving,” she says. To make a correct assessment, the team uses statistical data analysis, which they worked on in science. The method, according to the founders, is suitable for all types of advertising - “television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, shop windows, etc.” “We can track any external change that occurs due to advertising with an accuracy of 95%,” says Adamyan.

Expanenta records changes in traffic to a company's website and isolates from the general flow of users those who came to the portal as a result of interacting with advertising in the real, rather than virtual, world. The company’s founders do not disclose the essence of the technology, but customers are guaranteed “the same convenient tool for analyzing their clients as they have for evaluating online campaigns.”

Kirill Efimov (Photo: Expanenta)

Competing evaluators, according to Adamyan, do not know how to distinguish users attracted by outdoor advertising in the overall structure of visits to the online site. The metrics and characteristics from Expanenta are similar to those provided by the Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics services. For example, a startup can estimate how much each attracted customer was worth. “Based on this information, our clients can draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the channel,” explains Adamyan. “We assumed that outdoor advertising is a black hole that no one can study.”

There's magic inside

Expanenta works with data provided by client companies. First, the startup evaluates the flow of users before advertising activity, and measures trends and characteristics of the audience. Afterwards, they take measurements based on the results and compare using the capabilities of machine learning. “We are trying to understand what would have happened if the poster had not hung,” says Adamyan.

A machine learning model for such a specific task had to be developed within Expanenta. To solve some subtasks, methods from articles published a couple of years ago were used.

While the user interface is far from ideal, she admits. Entrepreneurs are working on a user-friendly version and preparing it for launch by the end of 2018. But customers already like the product, the partners say. “The first reaction to Expanenta is surprise. And then delight, they want to play with the instrument. We can say that its use has spurred the offline activity of clients,” states Adamyan.

Larisa Adamyan (Photo: Expanenta)

Clients like to “explore changes in traffic patterns based on business meetings, conferences and other activities.” In addition to automated reports, the startup offers human expertise—in addition to the startup, partners work as data analysts and do consulting.

Today Expanenta's clients are companies in France and Germany, medium-sized businesses. “Because we work with data, it is very difficult to convince large companies to share it after the scandal with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” lament the founders. Therefore, their main customers are food delivery services, retailers, ticket sales aggregators and other projects that work with data. “Plans for the near future include cooperation with a large perfume company from Berlin and a media company from France,” shares Adamyan.

Osamma Ommar's French accelerator The Family also helped with clients. Expanenta became part of it in the summer of 2018 and immediately received clients from companies included in The Family’s portfolio. “We had a prototype and decided to look for an accelerator. We found the Family website. The site seemed too bright, the founders say. “But we applied, talked to them and realized this is the place for us.” The Family most often does not invest money in projects, but offers startups other resources - connections, assistance with production, participation in workshops and seminars. Based on the results, the startup can decide for itself whether to give the accelerator a 5% share or not.

So far, Expanenta has only seven clients. After joining the accelerator, things exploded, the founders say, and the startup has been steadily expanding its user base since launching in July. The cost is calculated individually for each project. “We are a small company, and therefore the amounts of pilot projects are small, usually a few hundred euros,” Adamyan clarifies.

Our Universe is an amazing place where you can find anything. Literally every month, astronomers from all over the world find something new that cannot be explained by modern science. Here are the 10 strangest cosmic phenomena that astronomers have noticed recently...

Boomerang Nebula

A temperature of -272°C makes the Boomerang Nebula the coldest place in the entire Universe. The reason for this is the constant expansion of the nebula at a speed of 367,000 miles per hour, which, for a moment, is 10 times faster than the fastest man-made object in the Universe, the New Horizons apparatus, moves.

This star is 256 times more massive than our Sun and shines 7.4 million times brighter. In other words, it's just a giant. Scientists believe that the object R136a1 was formed from several other stars, but still cannot understand why it has existed for so long.

Oldest Black Hole

Object J0100+2802 may be the oldest black hole in the galaxy. When the Universe was only 875,000,000 years old, this hole was already formed from 12 billion suns. By comparison, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is only 5 million Suns in size.

HD 189733b

The blue hue of this planet may remind you of the world's oceans, or a pleasant summer day. But don't be fooled: this huge gas giant rotates in a minimal orbit, very close to its star. There is no water here and there never will be. The temperature is 900 degrees Celsius and the azure sky is raining molten glass.

Galaxy X

Galaxy X, discovered by Indian astronomers, consists almost entirely of mysterious black matter. It was possible to notice it only due to the influence of the galaxy on the surrounding stars. Scientists suggest that before them is the beginning of the creation of the largest black hole in the Universe.

Cloud Smith

The giant gas cloud is several million times the mass of our Sun. And, in contrast, the Smith Cloud is rushing towards the Milky Way. 70 million years ago, it already collided with our galaxy. In 30 million years, astronomers predict another collision, but no one knows what it will lead to.

Hermit Planet

The lonely planet recently discovered by astronomers is only 70 million years old. It is quite close to our galaxy. Most likely, object CFBDSIR2149 was thrown out of its home system and is now leading a hermit existence.

Asteroid Cruithney

Cruitney is a rare phenomenon, the appearance of which astronomers still cannot explain. This is a near-Earth asteroid that regularly flies dangerously close to our planet. It moves in orbital resonance with the Earth and, theoretically, will crash into it in a few million years. The size of Cruithne will most likely lead to the death of all living things.

Pulsar Black Widow

A neutron star remains from the explosion of a massive star and is called a pulsar. Black Widow is a millisecond pulsar that also emits gamma rays. He literally devours a small planet rotating with him.

El Gordo galaxy cluster

In such a vast place as our universe, there are many very, very strange things. One of the phenomena is the giant galaxy cluster El Gordo. It is located 9.7 billion light years away from us. It contains about 3,000,000,000,000,000 (three million billion stars). The chance of finding extraterrestrial life here is very high.

Our endless Universe is full of strange, hostile and, possibly, life-giving phenomena. Imagine a space gate where objects can disappear, appear, or move through time or space.
In most cases, this is a ticket into the unknown. You can be torn apart in a black hole when moving to another part of the Universe, or, like a fountain, thrown out of a white hole...

A black hole is a region in space-time whose gravitational attraction is so strong that even objects moving at the speed of light, including quanta of light itself, cannot leave it. The boundary of this region is called the event horizon, and its characteristic size is called the gravitational radius. In the simplest case of a spherically symmetric black hole, it is equal to the Schwarzschild radius.

Since the theoretical prediction of black holes, the question of their existence has remained open, since the presence of a “black hole” type solution does not yet guarantee that there are mechanisms for the formation of such objects in the Universe. From a mathematical point of view, it is known that, at a minimum, the collapse of gravitational waves in the general theory of relativity steadily leads to the formation of trap surfaces, and therefore a black hole

The most reliable evidence is considered to be evidence of the existence of supermassive black holes in the central regions of galaxies. Today, the resolution of telescopes is not sufficient to distinguish regions of space with a size on the order of the gravitational radius of a black hole (besides the black hole at the center of our Galaxy, which is observed by very long baseline radio interferometry at the limit of their resolution). Therefore, there is a certain degree of assumption in identifying the central objects of galaxies as black holes (except for the center of our Galaxy). It is believed that the established upper limit on the size of these objects is insufficient to consider them as clusters of white or brown dwarfs, neutron stars or even ordinary-mass black holes.

Stars and planets, galaxies and satellites, asteroids and meteorites - everything about space and space objects on our channel. The most complete collection of documentaries about space, its structure and life. Watch new documentaries about the universe every day, penetrate into all the secrets of space and find out all the mysteries of the Universe!

We reveal all the secrets of space and the Universe, the mysteries of the Solar System and Galaxies. All the most stunning objects in the Universe - pulsars, quasars, black holes, giant planets and terrestrial planets - will reveal their secrets to you. You will get to know the planets Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Mercury and alien planets of other galaxies with their satellites.

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