Just What You're Looking For: Recommender Team Suggests Winning Strategies

The final push for the hat trick came down to the wire. Five minutes before the deadline, the team submitted work in its third and hardest data science competition of the year in recommendation systems. Called RecSys, it's a relatively new branch of computer science that's spawned one of the most widely used applications in machine learning, one that helps millions find what they want to watch, buy and play. The team's combination of six AI models packed into the contest's limit of 20 gigabytes all of the smarts it culled from studying 750 million data points. An unusual rule in the competition said the models had to run in less than 24 hours on a single core in a cloud CPU.