We are happy to announce that the keynote speaker and panelists for the BARS workshop have been confirmed.
Torben Brodt from plista GmbH will give a keynote on “The Search for the Best Live Recommender System”. plista is a data-driven content- and ad distribution network, mainly active in the German speaking world. Its technology is used on thousands of premium websites for recommending millions of news articles and ads to even more users. Currently, over 5,000 requests are processed per second. In his talk, he will present challenges and opportunities that arise from handling such vast amounts of data in real-time. In particular, he will illustrate why users’ context (e.g., category, geo-location, day of the week) plays a key role in the provision of successful recommender algorithms and will outline the importance of a thorough evaluation of our techniques. Besides, he will talk about their experience in organizing a real-time news recommender contest which provides researchers the chance to run their algorithms in our production system, thus benefiting from real feedback from real users.
The workshop will end with a panel session where experts from Academia and Industry who will discuss emerging challenges in the field. Panel members are Paul N. Bennett (Microsoft Research), Jeremy Pickens (Catalyst Repository Systems), Jimmy Lin (University of Maryland) and Neil Hurley (UCD). We are looking forward to some lively discussions.
