In this volume, we discuss Data Mining and The Birthday Paradox.
Big Data has become the subject of Big Hype, much as Social Media and Mobile were recently. Our goal today is to peel back the hype and discover some of the key principles behind Big Data so we can make the best possible decisions about when, where, and how to apply it.
July 15, 2013 was a sad day indeed for all of us involved in recommender systems. John T. Riedl, one of the seminal pioneers of the field, passed away after a prolonged illness. John was an innovator not only in the academic study of Computer Science, but also in its industrial application, and in his concern for its social consequences.
Starting today, IBM’s Watson supercomputer will go up against a pair of human Jeopardy champions. Regardless of whether man or machine comes out on top, it will be a banner day for a machine learning technique called ensemble learning.
Last fall I had the pleasure of visiting Barcelona, one of my favorite cities on earth. It normally wouldn’t take much beyond the great Catalan food and wine to entice me to visit, but in this case there was an even more compelling reason to visit—to participate in the ACM Recommender Systems conference and spend time digging into deep technical conversations with some of the leading scientists and engineers in the field.
Today, I had the opportunity to write about the Amazon-Facebook partnership on Mashable with a post titled How Online Retailers Can Leverage Facebook’s Open Graph.