Former Tigers reach finals of Netflix competition

Correction appended

Three friends from the Class of 2007 reached the finals of the Netflix Challenge, a competition held by the internet DVD rental service with the goal of improving its method of predicting customer movie preferences.

Team leader David Weiss ’07 and teammates Lester Mackey ’07 and David Lin ’07 came in second place for the “Progress Prize.” A team from AT&T took first place, winning a cash prize of $50,000. The overall competition also featured a grand prize of $1 million.

The three faced off against a variety of competitors, including researchers from AT&T and a team from the University of Toronto, Weiss said in an e-mail. The team “decided to merge with a Hungarian team in the last weeks leading up to the Progress Prize to have a shot at overtaking AT&T,” Weiss said.

Though the team didn’t win the prize, “we joked about [winning it], and I think we all half-seriously secretly wished we would win,” Weiss said. “I don’t think we ever imagined seriously that we would end up so close to beating AT&T,” he said.

The three alumni named their team “Dinosaur Planet” in honor of the first movie listed in the test code of their program, Weiss said.

Netflix provided each of the competitors with anonymous customer movie ratings, and participants were tasked with using the data to improve the current recommendations system by at least 10 percent.

The team worked with professors Rob Schapire and David Blei, who work in the Machine Learning Group in the computer science department. The team “worked extremely hard, did a huge amount of background reading, and used their own talent and creativity to come up with many great ideas that were entirely original,” Schapire said in an e-mail.

A computer science major, Weiss cited the encouragement and inspiration he received from faculty in his department as well as the thorough technical grounding his studies gave him as two elements central to his personal contribution to the team. Now a research assistant in the University’s psychology department, Weiss plans to start graduate school in the fall.

Lin, who was Weiss’ senior year roommate, earned his degree in mathematics and is now trading interest-rate derivatives at JPMorgan.

“Regardless of whether we ever win the ultimate prize, the amount of knowledge and experience we have gained through the entire process is invaluable and we sure had a lot of fun in the process,” Lin said in an e-mail.

During his time at the University, Mackey won the Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, an annual award given to one or more graduating seniors who have manifested exceptional scholarship, leadership and personal character. He is currently a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

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The competition runs from October 2006 to October 2011. “We’ve been starting work again as our Hungarian collaborators have made a lot of progress. We’re now up to a combined 8.7% improvement, and our team ‘When Gravity and Dinosaurs Unite’ is the current leader,” Weiss said.

Weiss, Lin and Mackey have each received numerous job offers after their success in the competition, but the three have other plans.

“None of us are looking for a job right now,” Weiss said.

Correction:

This article originally stated that the team had won the Progress Prize. The team was in fact in second place. The article also reported that the three alumni named their team in honor of the last movie listed in the test code of their program, when it was in fact the first movie listed. Likewise, references made by Weiss to the $1 million grand prize in fact referred to the Progress Prize. The Daily Princetonian regrets these errors.