Friday, July 18, 2014

July 29 - A Month of Magic

This month, we have two magical talks for you.

Collaborative Filtering - the magic of recommendations (Weiming Chen, @mingstar)
Ever wonder how Amazon generate its book recommendations? Do you want to do the same for your site? Introduce Collaborative Filtering (CF), one of the commonly used technique deployed by recommender systems. CF helps you to dig out the values of server logs, transaction history, and increase user engagement and loyalty. In this talk, sample C# code will be presented to illustrate the guts of CF.

Weiming works on data-driven products in Fairfax Media that serve millions of users, his expertise is on data analytics, recommender systems, Hadoop, and MapReduce

Aaron presents something magical* (Aaron Powell, @slace)
Have you ever implemented elementary arithmetic in code? What happens at a code level when you add two numbers? Come for a journey on some of the most pointless software there is and learn the magic of numbers!

* HINT: think surreal numbers and JS... And yes, he asked for that title :-)