Congratulations to Bob Bell and Chris Volinsky from AT&T, one of NISS' affiliates, who are part of the team that won the $1M Grand Prize from the Netflix Prize contest. They won the prize for devising the best way for Netflix to improve its movie recommendation algorithm, which generates an average of 30 billion predictions per day, by ten percent or greater.
Bell and Volinsky were part of team BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos. They achieved the winning RMSE of 0.8567 on the test subset. This represents a 10.06% improvement over Cinematch's score on the test subset at the start of the contest. The competition lasted three years, a long time to achieve these results.
The team consisted of Bob Bell, Martin Chabbert, Michael Jahrer, Yehuda Koren, Martin Piotte, Andreas Töscher and Chris Volinsky.
The Prize was awarded in a ceremony in New York City on September 21, 2009.
Read more about the award in this AP wire story.