Takeaways from Netflix's Personalization Workshop 2018

For the third time Netflix organized its Personalization, Recommendation and Search Workshop. It was awesome to get invited for this event during my tech holiday in the San Francisco Bay Area. The experienced data scientists from all over Silicon Valley and beyond made it a knowledge-rich day. Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and University of Minnesota shared how to understand and serve your users better. There was one subject that all speakers agreed on: classic matrix factorization (collaborative filtering) reached its expiration date. This includes challenges of multi-armed bandits, an implicit feedback approach, top-N ranking techniques, tyranny of the majority and algorithmic bias. At Netflix almost your whole homepage is personalized: the banner, carousels, order, artwork, text and search. That is why they state that a good recommender system considers: what, how, when and where a title is recommended.