Talk: "Lessons from the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize"

Date/Time:  Thursday, March 19th, 6 pm
Location:  Olmsted 211C
Speaker:  Dr. Robert Bell (formerly with AT&T Labs-Research, soon to be with Google)

You are invited to hear Dr. Robert Bell discuss collaborative filtering and recommender systems for the COMP 597: Data Mining course.  Dr. Bell is one of the winners of the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize, a competition sponsored by Netflix to improve the accuracy of their movie recommendation system.  Since space is limited, if you are interested in attending and you are not enrolled in the Data Mining course, please RSVP to Dr. Blum (jjb24@psu.edu).

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Robert Bell is scheduled to join Google in April of this year.  Until recently, he was a member of the Statistics Research Department at AT&T Research since 1998.  He previously worked at RAND doing public policy analysis.  His current research interests include machine learning methods, analysis of data from complex samples, and record linkage methods.  He was a member of the team that won the Netflix Prize competition.  He has served on the Fellows Committee of the American Statistical Association, the board of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, the Committee on National Statistics, the advisory committee of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and several previous National Research Council advisory committees studying statistical issues from conduct of the decennial census to airline safety.   Dr. Bell received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University, an M.S. Statistics from the University of Chicago, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College.