1. The Recommender
Challenge Hackathon
Torben Brodt
plista GmbH
2013/04/24

2. 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

3. Architecture

4. Architecture

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

6. Tracking Success
● "online evaluation" technology
● better than classical offline evaluation known
from papers?
● cooperation with TU Berlin, aided by state
???

7. 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

8. The hackathon
● many interesting people
● get to know developers using
○ PHP, Java, NodeJS, Python
○ Redis, Storm, Elastic Search
○ Apache Mahout, Lucene
○ ...

9. The hackathon
● http://contest.plista.com/bigdataweek2013
○ 4pm start
○ 6pm "hello world!"
○ 7pm pizza + mate
○ ... open end fun

10. How to start (1/3)
register at
contest.plista.com
select challenge
* bdw13
* weekly

11. How to start (2/3)
● start implementation using examples
● http://contest.plista.com/wiki/example

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Summary
join us?
http://www.plista.com/career
stay in touch?
Torben Brodt, plista.com, google plus, twitter, ..

16. Discounts
30% discount code: PLISTA30
● NoSQL Infrastructure
● Killing pigs and saving Danish bacon with Riak
● Introduction to Graph Databases
● Yokozuna, combining Solr with Riak
● Why you should care about Big Data
● ...
And Lottery...
● 1 FREE TICKET
And more Torben
● Talk about Realtime Recommendations

18. Hint
● now watch out for teammates
and have fun!