Netflix prize awarded, a new challenge is made

Josh and I both have followed the Netflix challenge, an open-source style competition to beat out their movie matching algorithms, with a good deal of interest.

I hope that predictive analytics can have a more collaborative effort in other disciplines as well, allowing us to all benefit from insights and successes.

Note that Netflix has enlisted a new challenge, predicting movie selection based purely of bio-demographic and geographic data. This should be very intersting.

A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others

Even the near-miss losers in the Netflix million-dollar-prize competition seemed to have few regrets.

Netflix, the movie rental company, announced on Monday that a seven-man team was the winner of its closely watched three-year contest to improve its Web site’s movie recommendation system. That was expected, but the surprise was in the nail-biter finish.

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Linked Data: World Wide Web for Data

Tim Berners-Lee gave an interesting talk on linking data through the web for public use. Tim was the one who had the idea for HTTP and the actual web concept we all use now. This is a worthwhile talk to at least consider as an analytics professional.

From TED
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

See the video