Recommender systems: find preferences & create recommendations using big data

Dear members of Big Data Groningen,

We are happy to announce that CataWiki is the sponsor for the edition of the big data groningen meetup to be held at the Launch Cafe on Thursday the 14th of July!

This edition of the Big Data Groningen meetup will take a dive into the topic of recommendation systems;

Recommendations are applied everywhere around us these days; from events to products to services, in fact anything people could be interested in, can be recommended.

This evening a number of interesting talks will bring the subject alive describing real world examples of use cases where recommendation systems are applied.

The preliminary two speakers for the evening;

Adam Powell - Senior Data Scientist and Denis Dallinga - Data Engineer of CataWiki (http://www.catawiki.nl)

Recommendation systems @ Catawiki: A brief overview of the recommendation projects at Catawiki, and how we built them.

Gideon de Kok of Luxent (http://www.luxent.io)

Most traditional recommendation engines focus on giving customers alternative products, based on customer input and behaviour, within a closed context like a shop or streaming service.

Discovery engines try to deliver the same kind of services within a more open environment. The unstructured nature of common web data forces an architecture to incorporate additional technology for correct feature extraction from less structured and symmetrical sources of information.

Luxent builds a lead-generation solution for one of its clients, using available information from the web and social networks. Gideon will show how such a product can be built by combining the foundation of discovery engines with other machine learning techniques.

And the 3rd speaker is...Yonatan Alexander!

And he will show a demo, featuring implicit and explicit data modelings!

In addition I've contacted the launch cafe and, as there are many on the waiting list, but a limited amount of chairs (approx. 40), we are allowed to have everyone that is on the waiting list! Please do understand you can attend the meetup but have to be standing the whole evening! We have room for about 20 persons.

Hope to see you all there!

- The organizers of Big Data Groningen