GOTO Amsterdam is a vendor independent international software development conference with more that 50 top speaker and 500 attendees. The conference covers topics such as Java, Open Source, Agile, Architecture, Design, Web, Cloud, New Languages and Processes.

Presentation: "A Real World Multifactor Recommender System & the Required Nextgen Integration Solution"

Track: Solutions Track Thursday / Time: Thursday 10:20 - 11:10 / Location: Keurzaal

Part one:
Creating recommendations using scalable technology, such as PIG, HIVE or Mahout, is one thing, but what does it take to develop an operating recommender system and what crucial customer behavioral factors are involved, what is the impact of the visual presentation of an item being recommended or the way customers move from one item to another?
Some questions related to using these customer behavior factors in a multifactor recommender system are:

  • What should be the level of personalization?
  • How does the real time behavior of the customer constrain the recommender system?
  • How do we measure success when everything is constantly changing?

In this talk I will address the above mentioned questions and give insight into the multifactor recommender system of online retailer bol.com. Moreover, experiences will be shared with building this recommender system and the quality of its output.

Part two:
In online retail we apply the concept of Customer Centric Selling to ensure we shape the behavior of the website to optimally suit the needs of the visitor. Some details of this are presented in part one.
For a long time we have been able to preprocess earlier behavior for returning visitors to do this.
But what do you do if that visitor is anonymous? How do you respond to new behavior on the next page they view?

In this session we will show how we at bol.com have adapted the Lambda Architecture to meet our specific needs for this use case.

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Barrie Kersbergen, Lead Developer at Bol.com

Barrie Kersbergen

Biography: Barrie Kersbergen

Barrie Kersbergen (1975, Gorinchem, the Netherlands) is a Lead Developer at bol.com since 2010. His expertise lies in big data and algorithms and is part of the team that builds software which provides personalized content to optimize customer experience using scalable technology. Barrie’s working experiences are also drawn from his years prior to bol.com, when he was a software developer at the Freudenthal Institute for science and mathematics education. At this institute, he worked from 1999 to 2010 where he has been programming educational software. Furthermore, Barrie has built and maintained High Availability clusters for running large assessment frameworks.

Twitter: @krsbrgn

Niels Basjes, IT Architect at Bol.com

Niels Basjes

Biography: Niels Basjes

Niels Basjes (1971) has been working for bol.com since May 2008. Before that he was working as a Webanalytics architect for Moniforce, and as an ICT architect/researcher at the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam. At bol.com the primary focus of Niels Basjes are scalability problems and he is responsible for a shift in thinking about data and the business value it contains. Niels designed and implemented many of the personalization algorithms that are in production today at bol.com. Niels studied Computer Science at the TU Delft, and has Business administration degree from Nyenrode University.

Twitter: @nielsbasjes