Netflix movie recommendation prize

As discussed in this article from Wired Magazine, Netflix is offering a $1 million prize for improving its recommendation system by at least 10%. I have known about the prize---launched in late 2006---for a while, but my networks group has only recently started tinkering with that dataset. (By the way, a tip of the cap to group alum Eric Kelsic for letting me know about the article in Wired.) I don't particularly care about the prize (and I doubt we're even going to explicitly try for it at any point), but this is a fucking awesome dataset, and I do care a great deal about that!

The article's title is a bit misleading. If you read it (and it's an extremely interesting article), you'll find that the psychologist has a Masters degree in operations research, which provides extremely relevant mathematical tools, so the idea that he's not approaching this with mathematics is hogwash. I certainly appreciate his attempts to use psychological ideas to help drive the algorithms, and his comments are quite reminiscent of the things I have heard social scientists say about the mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists who study social networks. Basically, they (correctly!) try to remind us that while we're focusing on crunching numbers, it helps considerably (and can be necessary---they would say that it's always necessary, but I don't quite agree with the statement when it's phrased with that strength) to remember that what we're actually dealing with people (or other relevant agents rather than numbers and to incorporate that as necessary in our algorithms.

The psychologist's daughter is apparently starting a mathematics degree at Oxford in the fall, so maybe I have a potential recruit for my research group?

Also, I very much appreciate the fact that a popular article like this one discusses singular value decompositions. I approve!