Netflix Prize winner and winner of the Federal State Award of Austria
The most important prize in the field of recommender systems, the Netflix Prize, and the Austrian Federal State Award for Consulting and Information technology 2009 went on commendo!
Netflix Prize:
It was an amazing day for commendo's head researchers, Andreas Töscher and Michael Jahrer. On September 21st, 2009 Netflix officially presented the winner of the Grand Prize in New York City: Team BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos!
commendo – in the joint multinational team of "BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos" – were the leading competitor on the decisive test set and invited to the final verification process, which ended two weeks ago.
The contest was started by the world's largest online movie rental service Netflix.com in October 2006 and involves a prize money of no less than 1 million US-Dollars. The challenge was to improve Netflix's existing recommendation software by more than 10 percent. The commendo team, who had accepted the challenge together with more than 40,000 other teams from 185 countries, already won the Netflix Progress Prize 2008.
Austrian Federal State Award:
The Austrian Federal State Award 'Consulting / Knowledge based services' 2009 was given to commendo research & consulting!
Christine Marek, state secretary of the Republic of Austria (Federal Ministry of Economy), handed over the award to the team of commendo. Georg Preßler, Michael Schrotter, Michael Jahrer and Andreas Töscher had successfully participated in Netflix Prize competition, which was one of the reasons for getting this year's Federal State Award.
Christine Marek (state secretary) and Georg Preßler, Michael Schrotter, Michael Jahrer, Andreas Töscher (commendo)
The price ceremony was held on November 23rd, 2009 in Vienna, Austria.
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