I’m intrigued by the announcement of The Netflix Prize. Already some of the students in the lab are keen to see if they can win the $50,000 or even the $1,000,000 prize!
From the website: “The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. “
And from The Guardian:
“US online DVD rental service Netflix Inc has announced a version of the Longitude prize for film geeks – a $1m bounty to the first person to develop software to improve its movie recommendation system by 10%.
Currently, the system “learns” the individual taste of each of Netflix’s 5.2m subscribers by asking them to rate the films they watch. This data is then used to generate a list of suggestions or “recommendations”, unique to each user.
To win Netflix’s prize, the software program must demonstrably improve upon the current movie-recommendation system by at least 10%. The differences will be tracked by a program that quantifies how well the recommendation systems predict which movies will be liked or disliked by a profiled consumer.”
