Publications

New York Times, By KATIE HAFNER, June 4, 2007

Sometimes a good idea becomes a great one after it is set loose.

Last October, Netflix, the online movie rental service, announced that it would award $1 million to the first person or team who can devise a system that is 10 percent more accurate than the company's current system for recommending movies that customers would like. (Editor: see www.netflixprize.com).

About 18,000 teams from more than 150 countries � using ideas from machine learning, neural networks, collaborative filtering and data mining � have submitted more than 12,000 sets of guesses. And the improvement level to Netflix�s rating system is now at 7.42 percent.

...

For several months, a team from the University of Toronto was in the lead, but a group from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, calling themselves Team Gravity, surpassed the Canadians in January and remains in front.

...

Domonkos Tikk, a data mining expert who is a senior researcher at the university in Budapest, leads Team Gravity. Dr. Tikk said that since October, his team, which is composed of three Ph.D. candidates and himself, has spent eight hours a day, seven days a week on the problem.

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