In 2002, Niklas Karlsson earned his PhD from UCSB in Mechanical Engineering. Here we honor him for his contributions to the field.

UCSB Mechanical Engineering alumn Dr. Niklas Karlsson has been chosen as the recipient of the department's 2015 Alumni Award. Dr. Karlsson was honored with this award for his outstanding application of system engineering principles to the field of online advertising. 

Dr. Karlsson is Vice President of Research and Development at AOL/Verizon, and directs Algorithm Research within AOL Platforms, R&D. He was recruited by Advertising.com (AOL) in 2005 to build and direct the research group responsible to develop the next generation advertising campaign control system. During his tenure at AOL Niklas has conceived and developed for example the feedback-control based advertising campaign delivery system AdLearn™ 5, and the bid randomization-based content optimization system ContentLearn™. From 2002 to 2005 Niklas was the principal investigator of navigation and feedback control at Evolution Robotics, where he among other things invented the vSLAM™ technology which triggered iRobot’s acquisition of Evolution Robotics. With a passion for control, optimization, machine learning, statistics, signal processing, and bidding strategies his work has resulted in many successful products and 25 issued U.S. patents with many more patents and products in the pipeline. Karlsson received his Ph.D. at University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Dynamic Systems, Control, and Robotics. He received an M.A. in Statistics and Applied Probability from UCSB and a M.S. in Engineering Physics from Lund University. At UCSB Niklas received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award (2000-01).

Join us at our annual graduate student convocation on Wednesday, October 7th, at 3pm in ESB 1001 to hear Dr. Karlsson give a short talk on the topic of modeling and control in online advertising. Click here to see the full abstract.