How to build accurate internet-scale personalized recommendation services

An open lecture by

Dr. Christou Ioannis

When: Tuesday, November 27, 18:00-20:00

Where: Center for the Arts Auditorium

Organized by: The Graduate Master Class Series, School of Graduate and Professional Education

To reserve your place please contact Ms. Maria Kritikou via email: [email protected] or telephone: 210 6009800 ext. 1210


Lecture Description

In this lecture, we will survey major techniques for personalized recommendations services provided by most large e-commerce companies, beginning with the well-known Collaborative Filtering framework (CF) that attempted to capture the so-called “word-of-mouth” concepts, including early user-based CF, and proceeding to discuss later item-based and content-based CF. We review matrix factorization-based techniques, including Singular Value Decomposition, Non-negative Matrix Factorization, and Alternating Least Squares. Then we discuss parallelization and distributed computing issues, and will talk a bit about the custom-made implementation we did for Hellas On Line’s My Video Club, the performance of the system, and even some marketing lessons on the success of introducing a service.

Dr. Christou Ioannis

Ioannis T. Christou is Professor and Head of the Big Data Mining group at Athens Information Technology. He has a Dipl. Eng. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, an MBA from the Athens-MBA joint program of the Athens University of Economics and Business and the School of Mechanical Engineering of NTUA, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. He has been an adjunct professor of Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and the University of Patras, Greece. He also served as CTO and co-founder of Intelprize, a startup technology company specializing in Big Data and Recommender Systems. In the past, we was employed by companies such as Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ, Delta  Technology Inc., Atlanta, GA, and Intracom S.A. Development Programs Dept., Athens, Greece. His research interests are Data Mining, Parallel and Distributed Computing and Optimization.