In episode two I am joined by Even Oldridge, Senior Manager at NVIDIA, who is leading the Merlin Team. These people are working on an open-source framework for building large-scale deep learning recommender systems and have already won numerous RecSys competitions.We talk about the relevance and impact of deep learning applied to recommender systems as well as the challenges and pitfalls of deep learning based recommender systems. We briefly touch on Even's early data science contributions at PlentyOfFish, a Canadian online-dating platform. Starting with personalized recommendations of people to people he transitioned to realtor, a real-estate marketplace. From the potentially biggest social decision in life to the probably biggest financial decision in life he has really been involved with recommender systems at the extremes. At NVIDIA - to which he refers as the one company that works with all the other AI companies - he pushes for Merlin as large-scale, accessible and efficient platform for developing and deploying recommender systems on GPUs.This brought him also closer to the community which he served as industry Co-Chair at RecSys in 2021 as well as to winning multiple RecSys competitions with his team in the recent years.Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.Links from this Episode:Even Oldridge on LinkedIn and TwitterNVIDIA MerlinNVIDIA Merlin at GitHubEven's upcoming Talk at GTC 2021: Building and Deploying Recommender Systems Quickly and Easily with NVIDIA MerlinPlentyOfFish, realtorfast.aiTwitter RecSys Challenge 2021Recommending music on Spotify with Deep LearningPapersDacrema et al. (2019): Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches (best paper award at RecSys 2019)Jannach et al. (2020): Why Are Deep Learning Models Not Consistently Winning Recommender Systems Competitions Yet?: A Position PaperMoreira et al. (2021): Transformers4Rec: Bridging the Gap between NLP and Sequential / Session-Based RecommendationDeotte et al. (2021): GPU Accelerated Boosted Trees and Deep Neural Networks for Better Recommender Systems General Links:Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogiaSend me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.comPodcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/

Even Oldridge, a senior expert at NVIDIA specializing in recommender systems, dives into the intricacies of how these systems help users navigate the overwhelming internet. He explains the personalization process behind tailored suggestions and the significant benefits for various industries. They discuss the journey from computer vision to recommendation algorithms, the challenges smaller organizations face in deploying these systems, and the collaboration required between data scientists and engineers to advance their efficiency and effectiveness.