December 2, Tuesday
12:00 – 14:00
The Netflix Prize: Quest for $1,000,000
Computer Science seminar
Lecturer : Dr. Yehuda Koren
Affiliation : Yahoo Research in Haifa
Location : 202/37
Host : Dr. Michael Elkin
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 the competition together with
some of the principles and algorithms, which have led us to winning
the Progress Prizes in the competition.
Bio:
Yehuda Koren completed his PhD in CS at The Weizmann Institute on 2003.
He was with AT&T Research during 2003-2008, and recently joined Yahoo!
Research (Haifa)