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Vincent DiCarlo (www.dicarlolaw.com/) is a long time associate of Simon Funk and also a participant in the Netflix prize.

GPS: your website says that you are a lawyer, Admitted in New York and California, very unusual qualification for one of the active participants in the Netflix prize. How did you get involved in programming and Netflix Prize ?

Vincent DiCarlo

I have been trying to escape from law on and off for the last 21 years, and have dabbled in just about everything you can imagine, from selling hybrid cottonseed to computer programming. One of my many unsuccessful attempts to get into some other line of work was about ten years ago, when an old college friend asked me if I wanted to join him and some other software guys to complete an interactive 3D internet project that they had agreed to acquire from a startup that ran out of money. I jumped at the chance.

Simon was one of the guys on the project. We decided we didn't want investors or other pesky busybodies telling us what to do, so we all had to wear a lot of hats. I did legal and marketing work, wrote the help documents, and ran the beta testing program for the company, which was called 3D Anarchy. In the Fall of 1999, we sold 3D Anarchy's technology to Adobe, which further developed it and eventually released it briefly in a product called Adobe Atmosphere.

I have been hoping to do another software project ever since, and every once in a while would call or write Simon to see what he was working on and talk about whether he was ready. However, we had a lot of constraints. The project had to contribute to advancing Simon's main long term research interest, which is creating true artificial intelligence, had to be something we could do without outside financing, and had to have the potential to generate some revenue.

When the Netflix Prize was announced, I was ecstatic. The contest seemed as if it was written especially for us. Netflix was offering prizes and recognition for something that Simon had already spent several years working on and that everyone in the online marketing world would want--the ability to predict customer preferences--and all Netflix wanted in return was a nonexclusive license.

Besides the pleasure of working with, and learning from, someone who actually seems to enjoy explaining things to people like me who barely understand it, I have been able to make myself useful twiddling the dials on the programs that Simon writes, doing training runs on a discounted PC that I got at a clearance sale for that purpose, and writing Python and shell scripts for testing, preprocessing, postprocessing, and analyzing our results. I'm also hoping to figure out a way eventually to produce some income out of all this, even if we don't win a prize.

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