DyDAn Homeland Security Seminar Series


Title: Chasing $1,000,000: How we Won the Netflix Progress Prize

Speaker: Yehuda Koren, AT&T Labs

Date: February 18, 2008 12:00 - 1:30 pm

Location: DyDan Center, CoRE Bldg, Room 431, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ


Abstract:

The collaborative filtering approach to recommender systems predicts user preferences for products or services by learning past user-item relationships.

Their significant economic implications made collaborative filtering techniques play an important role at known e-tailers such as Amazon and Netflix.

This field enjoyed a surge of interest since October 2006, when the Netflix Prize competition was commenced. Netflix released a dataset containing 100 million anonymous movie ratings and challenged the research community to develop algorithms that could beat the accuracy of its recommendation system, Cinematch.

In this talk I will survey some of the principles behind the BellKor system, which has led us to winning the 2007 Progress Prize in the Netflix competition