Back

Speaker "Maokai Lin" Details Back

 

Topic

Dynamic Pricing and its AI Revolution

Abstract

Dynamic pricing has been widely adopted by industries such as airlines, hospitality, and cloud computing to react to demand changes and boost revenue of fixed rent-by-time assets. Recently the leading players in shared economy such as Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb are also actively researching and leveraging dynamic pricing to improve service and increase revenue. In this talk, I will present the basic approaches and impacts of dynamic pricing. I will show how AI -- as a combination of data science and software engineering -- can significantly change the effectiveness of dynamic pricing. As a concrete example, I will demonstrate how our dynamic pricing work in parking pushed revenues up by as much as 40% for locations in New York, Chicago, and Boston.

Profile

Dr. Maokai Lin is CTO and Co-Founder of Smarking, a data analytics Software as a Service (SaaS) startup for parking management based in San Francisco. Since launching Smarking in 2014, Maokai leads the company to provide real-time data visualization, predictive analytics, and dynamic pricing for over 2000 parking locations in the US and Canada, including clients such as City of Miami, City of Santa Monica, Boston Logan Airport, San Diego Airport, MIT, and Brookfield Properties. Maokai holds a PhD degree in Operations Research from MIT. Before Co-founding Smarking, Maokai worked on pricing and modeling at Facebook and Morgan Stanley.