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Overstock.com and RichRelevance Form Peer Review Committee for RecLab PrizeJan 17, 2012 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- As Overstock.com and RichRelevance continue to accept entries for the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com, the companies announced the formation of the Prize's Peer Review Committee. According to a release, researchers Eugene Agichtein of Emory University, Oliver Downs of Analytical Insights, Inc., and Alexander Tuzhilin of New York University Stern School of Business will join RichRelevance Chief Scientist Darren Vengroff to review all Prize submissions and select the ten semifinalists who will advance to compete for a cash award of up to $1 million. The RecLab Prize on Overstock.com, which encourages innovation in retail personalization, will continue to receive submissions at overstockprize.com until March 1, 2012. Current teams represent leading academic institutions around the world, including BYU, Hong Kong University and Warsaw University of Technology, among others. "Algorithm development is one of the most complex tasks in technology today, and we've assembled some of the brightest minds in computer and mathematical science to help us oversee the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com," said Darren Vengroff, Chief Scientist of RichRelevance. "As we move further along into the competition, the committee will ensure that the best teams or individuals get the recognition they deserve. We're excited to welcome such notable visionaries into the RecLab Prize and look forward to garnering their expertise." The Peer Review committee brings expertise in mathematics and computer sciences and years of experience at the top of their fields. The committee will review submissions based on novelty of design and expected effectiveness at generating sales lift. It will also ensure that the semifinalists represent a unique, diverse set of approaches to the problem, rather than a large number of subtle variants of a single approach. Members include: -Eugene Agichtein is an Assistant Professor in the Math and Computer Science department at Emory University, and is on the core faculty of the Biomedical Informatics program. Eugene founded and leads the Emory Intelligent Information Access Laboratory (IR Lab). He is a recipient of the "Best Student Paper" award at the ICDE 2003 conference, and of the "Best Paper" awards at the SIGMOD 2006 and SIGIR 2011 conferences. Eugene received a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University, and a BS in Engineering from The Cooper Union. -Oliver Downs is President and Chief Scientist at Analytical Insights, Inc. His background in algorithm design has resulted in 21 U.S. patents pending in the fields of Bayesian prediction, statistical estimation, outlier detection, real-time GPS data processing, and 10 granted patents in the fields of Quantum Optimization Algorithms, Dynamic Time Series Prediction, Location-based Data Probes, Anomaly Detection and Scalable Spatial Search. Previously, Oliver was Chief Scientist at Atigeo where he developed a learning semantic platform for personalization and search. He holds PhD and MA degrees in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University and BA, MA and MSc degrees in Experimental & Theoretical Physics, from the University of Cambridge, UK. -Alexander Tuzhilin is a Professor of Information Systems and an NEC Faculty Fellow at the NYU Stern School of Business. His current research interests include data mining, personalization, recommender systems and CRM. He has served on the Editorial Boards of several leading journals in his areas of expertise, and currently serves on the boards of the ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, the INFORMS Journal on Computing (as an Area Editor) and the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal. His various academic and industrial activities have been featured in major media publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and the Financial Times. Alexander received his BS in Mathematics from NYU, his MS in Engineering Economics from Stanford University and his PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU. -Darren Vengroff is responsible for all of RichRelevance's analytical and machine learning development-from high-level strategy and analytics, to strategic implementation plans. From startups to industry leaders Amazon.com and Goldman Sachs, Darren has designed and built a variety of customer-focused, scalable applications. Prior to RichRelevance, Darren was CTO and co-founder of Pelago, Inc. (makers of Whhrl) where he oversaw Pelago's technology and actively supported product definition, fundraising, and business development. Before Pelago, Darren was a Principal Engineer at Amazon.com and a Vice President at Goldman Sachs. Darren holds an MSc and PhD in Computer Science from Brown University, where he studied I/O-efficient algorithms with Jeff Vitter, and a B.S.E. in Computer Science with Highest Honors from Princeton University. "The RecLab approach to personalization innovation cleverly addresses the way we commonly need to treat proprietary data industry-wide today and provides a great framework to catalyze this industry through an exciting and practical competition," said Peer Review Committee Member, Oliver Downs. "I am extremely honored to have been selected as part of this committee and look forward to working with the teams and individual contestants, RichRelevance and Overstock.com in bringing this innovation to the market." More Information: http://code.richrelevance.com/reclab/ ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) |