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Psychologist Beating Math Nerds in Race to Netflix Prize
s1d writes "An almost-anonymous British psychologist named Gavin Potter has suddenly risen to the top of the Netflix prize charts. With his very first attempt, he got a score which took the BellKor team seven months to reach. Currently at a score of 8.07, he has only five teams ahead of him now in the race for the ultimate Netflix algorithm. 'Potter says his anonymity is mostly accidental. He started that way and didn't come out into the open until after Wired found him. "I guess I didn't think it was worth putting up a link until I had got somewhere," he says, adding that he'd been seriously posting under the name of his venture capital and consulting firm, Mathematical Capital, for two months before launching "Just a guy." When he started competing, he posted to his blog: "Decided to take the Netflix Prize seriously. Looks kind of fun. Not sure where I will get to as I am not an academic or a mathematician. However, being an unemployed psychologist I do have a bit of time."'"
5th place is not winning. Are you guys Ron Paul supporters too?
It's called domain knowledge people. It helps being a psychologist when you're write a program reacting to people's behavior. If programmers knew how to do that, they would get laid more.
And yes, I have karma to burn. Yes I do.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
that had an undergraduate degree in psychology, a masters degree in operations research that after being well employed for a number of years -- "In 2006, he left his job at IBM to explore the idea of starting a PhD in machine learning, a field in which he has no formal training. When he read about the Netflix Prize, he decided to give it a shot -- what better way to find out just how serious about the topic he really was?"
Just a guy who happens to own everyone else. ^_^
-Aegis Runestone-
Very few psych majors do psych professional.
I have a BA from U. of Houston, which I have used to do tech support and sales for a software company, and developed my own FPS as a solo project.
expandfairuse.org
The summary makes 2 references to Gavin Potter being a psychologist, but it ignores the part of the article that notes he has a master's degree in operations research. This is very much an OR problem. Still, it is impressive that he has been able to do as well as he has considering his competition. Good luck to him!
The topic is incredibly fascinating. And just a thought, up to 5 centuries ago "scientists" were incredibly versatile people, with mastery over a few fields at a time... A lot of people argue that this was out of necessity, but could the versatility have been important development of multiple renaissances (In Greece, East/West Asia, and Europe)? And could the bottleneck specialization of fields that has occurred in the past three centuries simply be period of transition/stifling new ways of thinking? Could the emergence interdisciplinary experts lead to another 'renaissance' of sorts?
He might be a psychologist, but his venture firm is named Mathematical Captital, after all. His partners appear to have advanced degrees involving mathematics.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I don't understand why Wired insists on playing along with Potter's pretense of being an "unemployed psychologist". He's a PhD candidate in machine learning, has a masters in operations research, is ex-IBM and Pricewaterhouse, runs a VC firm -- he has plenty of quantitative and computational training and experience, probably more than most of the contestants.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
My extensive retail experience says people like to shop by the following methods. Ratings, Genre, Alphabet.
So, if I was to setup a movie viewing for them. I'd setup something along the lines of a Genre, rating(R,PG-13,G), Alphabet.
It's kind of a takeoff on my video game organization method that increases sales of video games by 30 percent. I called it ABSRG short for Alphabetize By Section(4 foot section), Rating(M on top T in the middle and E towards the bottom.), Genre(Sports, driving, shoot em up). Please note, this cannot be patented, I already let it go out for more than a year(Started in 1998)and I have the pictures and time notes to prove it.
I've also found this to be true. Lol, I actually knew people in college that did nothing but program computers in their spare time, and took psych because it was easy, wouldn't distract them and gave them more time to do the programming they wanted. They didn't ever expect to practice psych.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Okay, I'm not trying for this prize, but there's one thing about Netflix "recommendations" that bugs me so I'm throwing out this complete freebie of an idea. If it helps someone get a 0.001% improvement to add this ONE little additional check, great.
I am learning Japanese. I have been watching several hundred Japanese-language movies for the past couple years. I don't watch movies in Greek, Spanish, Turkish, Farsi, Italian, Russian, German, or Hebrew. I did watch Amelie four years ago but that doesn't mean I love French movies. Most of my recommendations are for foreign films, but only a small fraction of those recommendations are for Japanese movies.
Apparently, Netflix doesn't have a column in their database saying WHAT language a movie uses principally, it just has a flag saying it is not English. It's the only explanation I can see for not checking for such a strong correlation. I admit, I might not be sharing the experience of the most common movie-renting drone in the bunch, but I doubt I'm the only person who has such a lopsided taste in movies. If the language (or alternate soundtrack languages) ARE known in the database, please see if the renter has a bias for movies in a particular language.
[
Does anyone know how big the dataset download is and what the format is? The website wants a registration before it lets you download the dataset.
Being beaten up is normal for any nerd, but by a Psychologist - that's gotta hurt...
What a bunch of drivel. Just because their level of knowledge isn't what we have today, doesn't make it any "easier." Do you have any idea at all, or can you even comprehend, the kind of mathematics that were employed back in the day to solve anything? Take a look at the Principia for example. The geometry is insane. I'm a graduate student in Physics and I can't really follow his proofs.
Furthermore, because early scientists did not have as much to build on, that makes it all the more difficult. Where was Faraday to get his inspiration on lines of force? What lead Maxwell in the right direction to unifying light with electromagnetism?
It's great that 3rd graders know about electric circuits. That's the point of scientific progress. That doesn't make the original task trivial in any sense.
In other words, I hate you.
Yes, the story is old now (by Internet standards) and no, he's not actually winning. What he did do was make a great leap in the success of his process by using a better group of knowledge for a base to work with. This is neither new or amazing in anyway. The only reason it makes news is that it's so much common sense that the story is told as if he has had some huge breakthrough.
Even if he only gets to 9.25% I will bet he gets offers to work with AI researchers around the globe. That is, after all, what their stated goal is - more or less. Every programmer knows about the GUI wars, and has read stories about how programmers have trouble writing code or designing web sites that are intuitive for users. If you want to see you code break, put a user on the keyboard and wait a few minutes.
Just about everything that I do with computers shows me something that could be more impressive or intuitive. Can you say 'click START to shutdown' ? Applying psychology and math to a computer problem is a problem that programmers are faced with all the time, and the industry as a whole fails on this repeatedly. A matter of personal interest, hobby robotics, holds a particular problem that seems simple but is not and demonstrates the scope of the problem with this story. Try to build a small robot that can wander around your house and never get stuck behind the couch, or anywhere else. Even cockroaches can accomplish this, but sophisticated robotics cannot.
We've all seen people come from nowhere, solve a problem because they looked at it a different way than everyone else based on their experiences. I think that it is about time that we started doing more of this. The biggest problem that I can see thus far is that people don't act like computers, they seldom repeat anything with precision. Can you say manufacturing robot? Everyone of us has personal tastes, and it's usually only when Hollywood tells us what movies are good that we all fall in line. Sure, some 'blockbusters' fail, but they make money because of the hype. When you remove the hype, it falls apart. Picking out what other people like or might like based on a very small data set is a difficult task. Not everyone likes kids or movies for kids. Not everyone likes hollywood-ized cookie cutter movies. The task is daunting at best.
Apply that thinking to other things, and you can see why some websites work and others do not. Why some software works and why others fail. Should F1 be the help key or F3? Why not CTRL-H? Maybe your preferences for such things differ from mine. What I'm getting at is that predicting what a human will do is not simple. Categorizing movies by story, style, genre etc. is like applying a tag cloud to it and matching the tag hits of one group to your personal tag choices. It kind of works, kind of does not. Either way, it needs to be applied more often. Just today I received a thank you note from the local Honda dealer where I got my seat belt replaced under warranty. I bought the car 15 years ago from the dealer my mother likes, and is two states away from me now. The dealer that send the card is local to me (2 states from my mom) but they sent the card to her, at MY address. Tell me how a human would have done that?
The basic problem is that we humans accrue various bits of information and make decisions based on that. Our thinking process halts when something 'just doesn't make sense' to what we are doing. Computers don't do that... yet. Perhaps this guy is on to something, but then maybe not. A human would not only ask what other people liked this movie, but also "you really liked that piece of crap?"
To put the I in AI is going to take a lot of rethinking. Simply acting like a perfect human won't do it. Oh, you liked that movie? yeah, me too, I love the city where it was filmed. -- get a program to do that? That oddball out-of-left-field thinking is what will make the software very good at predicting what you will or will not like, maybe.
Have you ever tried to figure out what kind of music someone wou
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There a joke that I heard (that's actually pretty much true):
A Physicist goes to a Mathematician for advise on solving a Differential Equation. The Physicist explains this and writes the equation on a Blackboard. The Mathematician stares at the equation for more than half an hour. Finally, he says, "Yes, it has a solution."
Basically, the Maths (even applied) are about details and considering them *very* carefully. With this in mind, is it any surprise that they are somewhat "slow"? Especially when they are starting from scratch within the problem domain?
OK, how do you solve a cubic? Or grind the lenses for a telescope? Or build a water pump? How do you dress a head wound? Or isolate pure gases? Or calibrate a thermometer?
If you know how to do all those things, good for you. My point is that a secondary school education in "science" does not by itself provide one with the same understanding as the great scientists who first among all others figured out how to do each of these things.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Could the emergence interdisciplinary experts lead to another 'renaissance' of sorts?
Oh, I don't know. If only we had a art history & statistics dual major to figure it out...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
free after all since he is certain to find a job and thus wont have the time to do this anymore
Perhaps these things seem simple now because they were solved so long ago. Genius is genius. I have no doubt if Newton was alive today he would have no trouble understanding and solving the major outstanding problems faced by today's scientists. Also that's not to say there haven't been modern era "Renaissance" scientists, John von Neumann immediately comes to mind. I think however the GP's point was that sometimes real progress is made through the application of one field on another seemingly unrelated field. That in today's community of scientists there might be a degree of overspecialization which is acting as a detriment.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
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Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Genius is worthless alone if the field requires 100 textbooks worth of knowledge to even known the basics of. You have to understand those 100 textbooks or you can't make something that requires what those textbooks say as a basis. Otherwise you'll just spend all your time recreating what those textbooks say and never create anything new.
The team at the University of Toronto, who are using a neural networks approach, are led by Geoffrey Hinton who has a bachelors degree in experimental psychology.
Subjects get so complex and so specialized there HAS to be limits to how many giants a human can climb and still have time enough to become a giant themselves. Abstraction helps to greatly extend this range; the people behind abstractions/simplifications may not be considered giants because they do not produce progress themselves but just facilitate others so they can extend their reach into the unknown.
There does not appear to be that many 'giant' scientific figures anymore despite the exponential scientific growth. Maybe it is just an appearance and there are more; but are there more proportionally to the number scientists?
How many big leaps in knowledge have been made in the old fields like physics for example? If the decline does not exist now, won't it exist at some point??
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He rise to be a harried Potter?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Am I the only one that finds the phrase 'An almost-anonymous British psychologist named Gavin Potter' faintly ridiculous?
According to the Fine Article, This "just a guy" not only is a psychology major, he has an OR (operations research) masters, which is basically applied math : optimisation, statistics, etc. This is just the kind of winning combination for this type of problems.
Eh? How does making use of bog standard free market principles constitute fraud?
Netflix have set out exactly what product they want and the price they are willing to pay. If there are people out there willing and able to supply them with the product at that price, why shouldn't they?
And government employees doing research in thier own time is not costing you a dime.
Netflix benefits through a better product offering, thier customers benefit through a better product, and a fair number of contestants benefit (through exposure and experience if nothing else).
I think a few people missed your subtle humor ;)
I lost my sig.
Netflix is paying peanuts to get a lot of research done for them.
Nobody forced them to participate.
A team mentionned that they have learnt quite a lot during the contest.
The psychologist may loose the contest...But the publicity around is priceless IMHO. You would ever heard about him without it.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the wisdom of the crowds. :)
Once a proud programmer of Apple II's, he now spends his days and nights in cheap dives fraternizing with exotic dancers
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I've read some of BellKor's papers and they do infact consider many subtle psychological effects in the data, many if not all of their later improvements have been based on such effects. E.g. Giving later ratings additional weight over older ones - because the ratings to be predicted are more recents ratings.
This would be news if this guy overtakes BellKor. As it is (A) he actually hasn't come from nowhere, he's been working on the problem for some time, and (B) Just like everyone else he's been benefiting from the reported results of others.
"I don't understand why Wired insists on playing along with Potter's pretense of being an "unemployed psychologist". "
Because that's what he chooses to call himself?
I'm not really sure why it matters to you or why you think you get to have an opinion on the subject.
There is one scientist who springs straight into my mind when you talk about being knowledgeable in many disiplines making for a better scientist is a narrower field as well: Albert Einstein.
He worked as a patent clerk for many years. That required him to research a wide range of scientific subjects and understand whether each item was actually feasable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_examiner
http://www.kpkb.com/news-article-patent-intellectual-property.html
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/ae10.htm
I could try and explain this in more depth but simply following the links above will do a much better job than I ever could.
I dont read
Some people have experience in other areas of retail. Companies have entire departments dedicated to Plan-o-Grams, RSP training, floor layouts, display setups. The pay is significantly higher and oddly, those departments don't deal with customers. They should, but they don't... Dealing with customers gives you an insight into how they think and shop. If you can see that, you can increase sales.
Just so happens, I've worked in all these areas.
I once had a signature.
Ok, I think everyone's replies to this have been wrong. What has happened isn't primarily the result of people being paid for specializing, or amount of free time, or the complexity of the field. The difference between the 1700's and today is that its necessary to use ever more complex (and expensive) machines to do it right. Any bio/chem lab worth its salt has millions of dollars in equipment, physics/astronomy/engineering is no better. To really make an impact across these fields would basically mean your a billionaire and even then it would be a giant undertaking just to set up and maintain the lab. This is why noone does it unless the government gives them money or they have a business plan allowing them to recoup costs.
Maybe because some of the moderators understand the point?
The point wasn't that the achievements of the time were not enormous.
The point was that 'back in the day', since there was so little existing scientific knowledge, it was easy to be come an expert in a particular area. So after what is the modern-day equivalent of a 3rd-grader education, you were 'at the edge' of existing scientific knowledge and making new discoveries.
That's not the case anymore. There is so much scientific knowledge that most people have to pick up PhD's before they're anywhere near the 'edge' of scientific knowledge. When you have to spend 20 years just catching up on everything that is already known, that makes it a bit harder to make new discoveries in multiple specialties than it was in the old days, when there just wasn't much existing scientific knowledge to learn.
paintball
I don't think it has anything to do with textbooks. You remember people like Einstein, Newton, and von Neumann because of their ideas. You won't find new ideas in a textbook. Einstein himself said that reading too much ceases to be productive past a certain age (I forget the exact quote).
The important thing is to gather enough background knowledge to be able to come up with new ideas. That can be a lot or that can be a little, and it likely varies by person. It doesn't require absolute mastery of every nook in a field or combination of fields.
Actually I said that because I knew that insecure people who end up with even the slightest bit of authority (be it mod points, a promotion at work, or even public office) have a deep-seated negative reaction to anyone who questions things at more than the most superficial of levels. This is an irrational reaction, and so it has absolutely nothing to do with the merit or validity of what was said. I'll spell that out for you -- I could be absolutely right or I could be dead wrong, and this one reaction (from those who react this way) would be the same in both cases. I really do have karma to burn, so I was reminding such people that their abuse of the moderation system isn't going to bully me into appeasing their petty insecurities -- insecurities which tend to manifest when they have both an unwillingness to accept what I said and the inability to rebut it. In other words, they're cowards, and I refuse to be influenced by them.
Thus, it wasn't an effort to "save myself" at all -- you don't thumb your nose at petty insecure people and tell them that you refuse to conform to them without catching flak for it, not in this world. The fact that this abuse was corrected and my post went from -1 to +5 tells me that my real message did not go unheard.
And I don't understand your characterization of philosophers either. Maybe you haven't noticed, but this world values cleverness only, not wisdom. Cleverness finds new and creative ways to continue down the path that we are on. Wisdom, among many other things, can often suggest that the path we are on (and have invested in) is dead wrong and demands the courage to face this possibility. Therefore, a true philosopher who really questions and challenges things that most people just go along with has to be one of the least appreciated individuals in the world. It should be obvious that it's not something that you do because you need the praise and petty admiration of other people but then, I have always believed that no truly healthy person needs such things.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's funny how many people actually think it doesn't help to understand human behaviour to predict human behaviour - and you don't need to be a psychologist for that.
The goal for this competition ist to find a technical solution to a human problem. E.g. Based on algorithms, automatically predict (=technical solution) human preferences in a certain topic (=human problem). So in my opinion it would be best for them to join forces and combine technical prowess and realistic approaches to human behavior.
Why do you think the two Psychologists Tversky and Kahneman got the Nobel-Prize in economics for their Prospect Theory to predict human decisions in situations that involve risk. There has to be some truth in their approach that the decisions of a human being cannot always be fully explained by rational standards. Why else should the economs have given two psychologists "their" prize?
It's yet another example why we should lay down our blinders and start accepting that benefit lies in collaboration and mutual understanding of different disciplines. Psychology can profit (and did) from mathematical approaches and AI-resarch can benefit from psychological research.
Wireflyer
Highly modded contrary views are quite common on Slashdot. Marking one of these posts with "I have karma to burn" is also quite common, and almost always results in a highly modded post. Quite lame. If you don't care about your karma, then don't mention it.