The Recommender Challenge Hackathonplista GmbH2013/08/02

Torben Brodt

What is plista

● recommendation● advertising● network

● many big publishers in DE, AT, CH, ..● "other articles you might be interested.."● >8 billion impressions, clicks, engages, .. pM

Architecture

Tracking Success

● each time a recommender is chosen, plista will track its success.. for context and context combinations

???

Tracking Success

● "online evaluation" technology● better than classical offline evaluation known

from papers?● cooperation with TU Berlin, aided by state

???

The hackathon

● we open the data, you provide the knowledge

● develop a recommender which implements the http + json api

● plista will track the success, if you are smart, be the winner for the the best recommender

● best is live, best is scalable and best will work in industry

The hackathon

● many interesting people● get to know developers using

○ PHP, Java, NodeJS, Python○ Redis, Storm, Elastic Search○ Apache Mahout, Lucene○ ...

The hackathon

● http://contest.plista.com/○ started 2 year ago

● New API in august● News Recommender Challenge

○ ACM RecSys HongKong http://recsys.acm.org/

How to start (1/3)

register atcontest.plista.com

How to start (2/3)

● start implementation using examples● http://contest.plista.com/wiki/example

How to start (2/3)

● start implementation using examples● http://contest.plista.com/wiki/example

● have a github account?● "fork" one of the example projects● work on your local "clone"● upload to your server● enter url in your contest account

How to start (3/3)

● need a virtual server? ask us● need old data? start replay from

webinterface● try sending debug events from webinterface● wait for team activation● plista starts sending you real data● your responses are displayed on real

publishers

Recommender ideas

● concentrate on implicit feedback● think streaming / incremental

○ better to scale○ faster results, new articles are better than old

articles?● think about cross domain

○ contest is not allowed to mix items from different domains/publishers

○ want knowledge of the full data, but candidate items of a slice

How to go on?

improve the algorithms● there will be a new api● there will be more competition (SIGIR,

RecSys)

join the meetups: http://recommenders.de/join the team: http://www.plista.com/career