I have recently heard complaints that this blog is rather quiet lately. I agree. I have definitely been focused on publishing through other sources and have found little time to write interesting things here. On the one hand, I find twitter ideal for communicating quick and short ideas, thoughts, or pointers. You should definitely follow me there if you want to keep up to date. On the other hand, I have published a couple of posts on the Netflix Techblog. A few months ago we published a post describing our three-tier system architecture for personalization and recommendations. More recently we described our implementation of distributed Neural Networks using GPUs and the AWS cloud.
The other thing I continue on doing very often is give talks of our work at different events and venues. In the last few months, for instance, I have given talks at LinkedIn, Facebook, and Stanford.
This week I gave a talk and attended the Workshop on Algorithms for Modern Massive Datasets (MMDS). This is a very interesting workshop organized by Michael Mahoney every two years. It brings together a diverse crowd of people, from theoretical physicist and statisticians to industry practicioners. All of them are united by their work on large scale data-driven algorithms. You can find the slides of my presentation here.
So, what is next? If you want to catch some of my future talks, I will be giving a couple of public ones in the next few months.
First, I will be lecturing in the Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS) at CMU in early July. I am really looking forward to joining such a great least of speakers and visiting Pittsburgh for the first time. I will be lecturing on Recommendation Systems and Machine Learning Algorithms for Collaborative Filtering.
Late August I will be giving a 3 hour long Tutorial at KDD in New York. The tutorial is entitled “The Recommender Problem Revisited” and I will be sharing stage with Bamshad Mobasher.
Finally, I was recently notified that a shorter version of the same tutorial has been accepted at Recsys, which this year is held in the Silicon Valley.
I look forward to meeting many of you in any of these events. Don’t hesitate to ping me if you will be attending.
