When/where: This Friday we will have a guest lecture in the Mahan Hall Auditorium during Dean's Hour. See abstract below.
Recommender Systems for Fun and Profit
Dr. Chris Volinsky
Director of Statistics Research, AT&T Research, Florham Park, NJ
Abstract: In October 2006, Netflix released 100 million movie ratings as part of a $1M prize for any team that could improve their movie recommendation system by more than 10%. This landmark data set generated intense interest from the statistics and machine learning communities, and attracted entries from over 3000 teams from academia and industry. In this talk, I will review AT&T's experience analyzing this data using collaborative filtering techniques, leading to our winning a $50,000 progress prize, as well as a subsequent project applying the methodology to television viewing data.