The Adblocker Dev Summit this past 27th of September was a monumental event for the ad-blocking industry, and a great time to boot, with representatives from eyeo, Brave, Google, Adblock Plus, AdGuard, Opera, Cliqz, and from fields ranging beyond, including from universities and independent agencies.
Adblock Plus organized the Adblocker Dev Summit for the second year, aiming to give the most important stakeholders in the ad-blocking business a platform to network, exchange, and share knowledge. At the summit, some of the sharpest minds in the ad-blocking community had the chance to come together and broach the most pressing challenges the branch is facing. Whether that’s virtual reality, artificial intelligence or machine learning, many numerous, promising technologies which could change the future of ad-blocking were discussed. Shwetank Dixit did a great job finding the correct tone for the event, leading to prosperous conversations, and the overall vibe was of people coming together to face common challenges.
Oleksandar Paraska of eyeo GmbH with his talk “Machine Learning Techniques for Ad Blocking”
There was also an unexpected presentation by Hieu Le, of UC Riverside, about possible novel techniques for automatic circumvention detection in the wild. Le worked in collaboration with Athina Markopoulou of UC Irvine, and Zubair Shafiq of the University of Iowa, who the coordinators of the summit met in March during a meeting at The Web Conference to discuss possible collaborations, which shows how tightly knit the community has been in these last months.
A final new development, which worked quite well, was the Papers We Love session, where people discussed favorite papers written by other people in the field. It went so well that everyone agreed this should continue running between the summits. So there is now a Slack group, which attendees plan to use for that.
All in all, it was a highly engaging event, and one we will not soon forget. We are excited to see how it goes next year. Though, the summit will not technically be ‘over’ any time soon… We now have a lot of follow ups to do, and want to make sure initiatives that we decided to launch there actually get launched.
The wonderful participants of the summit