This document describes the Recommender Challenge Hackathon hosted by plista GmbH, a recommendation and advertising network. The hackathon challenges participants to develop recommenders that integrate with plista's API to provide recommendations on their publisher sites. Participants will have access to plista's recommendation data and their solutions will be evaluated based on success tracking in a live environment. The hackathon aims to bring together developers to share knowledge and work on recommender solutions using various technologies. The document provides instructions for registering and getting started on the hackathon.

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!