First recommenders.ie meetup

We are glad to announce our first meetup, which will take place in the TripAdvisor offices in Dublin, 6th May – 6:30pm to 9:00 pm

In our first event, we will have great lineup of three speakers that will interest everyone, from people getting familiar with recommenders to experts building systems.

Houssem Jerbi will talk about recommender systems models, ecosystem and applications. Tripadvisor’s Principal software Engenier Andrew Duffy will discuss the TripAdvisor experience with travel personalisation, followed by Eoin Hurrell, who will share his experience in building a recommender system using Spark in Clojure. Discussion will continue with food and drinks sponsored by tripAdvisor.

Places are limited, so please RSVP as soon as possible to avoid disappointments.

Talks details (talks start at 7:00 pm)

Recommender Systems: Models, Ecosystem and Applications, by Houssem Jerbi.

Recommender systems have become a promising tool to personalise the user experience on the web. Besides, there are many other applications where information overload motivated the development of personalised recommender systems.

In this talk, I will cover the recommender system intuition and the common models and algorithms. I will outline the technical infrastructure and ecosystem for building scalable recommender systems. Different recommender system applications and use cases will be discussed. To bring the problem of non-standard recommendations into focus, I will describe my experience with developing non-standard recommender systems to resolve problems different from web personalization.

Houssem is a research scientist at Insight Centre for Data analytics and a big data consultant. With a background in data science and business intelligence, Houssem, enjoys applying data-driven solutions to create value in business. You can follow him on twitter @Houssem_Jerbi.

Personalising travel @ TripAdvisor, by Andrew Duffy,

TripAdvisor is the world's leading travel site, and aims to help all of its users have a better trip. Originally this was entirely down to the hotel ranking based on user reviews, but over the last two years the personalisation team has built a recommender system for hotels and dozens of personalised user interface features to make TripAdvisor a unique experience for each user. I will talk about the road we took, how we personalise such a busy site, and what's in store for the future.

Andrew is currently principal Software Engineer @ TripAdvisor Dublin. He is working on Personalisation, and technical leadership for the Dublin Office. Previously, he founded some startups and worked in Gilt Groupe and Amazon.

Building a Recommender System using Spark in Clojure, by Eoin Hurrell

For this session we will look at a practical example of big-data recommender technology, using Apache Spark to build a recommendation system. We will use Clojure, a Lisp that works with Java inter-operability to write and evaluate a recommender in a testable efficient manner.

Eoin is a data scientist with a doctorate in computer science, specialising in machine learning. He has extensive experience working with large datasets and designing systems and experiments to learn from data.

Looking forward seeing you soon!