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Netflix Plans to Give Away Another Million Posted by: jmet, 10:35, September 22, 2009             Viewed: 341 Times Categories: Other, VOD/Streaming

The first competition was launched in 2006 and it just finished.  Hopefully this next one will go a little faster.  Over 40,000 teams from 186 countries submitted their ideas to help Netflix achieve the goal of a 10 percent improvement for the Netflix movie recommendation system.

The winning team, called "BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos",  is made up of software and electrical engineers, statisticians and machine learning researchers from Austria, Canada, Israel and the United States met each other for the first time when they went to collect their one million dollar prize.

The purpose of the first Netflix contest was to help Netflix accurately predicting movie enjoyment to new members from current members ratings.

This time Netflix has put a twist on it by helping them predict movie enjoyment by members who don't rate movies often, or at all, by taking advantage of demographic and behavioral data carrying implicit signals about the individuals' taste profiles.

Let the games begin...