The Netflix Prize competition attracted a well-earned white hot spotlight in recent years, awarding a $1,000,000 prize last month for advancement in product recommendations systems – the prediction of each consumer's movie ratings. Predictive Analytics World speaker Istvan Pilaszy pioneered in this competition by cofounding the first "open collective" team that blended in any and all submissions by other teams willing to contribute. Just like the "Borg" on Star Trek, this team gained power by assimilating others, and in this way came in an extremely close second place – the winning team was evaluated by Netflix as an equal tie in analytical performance, and had submitted its winning solution just 20 minutes earlier! At PAW, Pilaszy will provide an expert/practitioner-level presentation, "Lessons That We Learned from the Netflix Prize," surveying the most important state-of-the-art advancements established during the Netflix competition. Named after the Netflix Prize team, Pilaszy's firm, Gravity R&D, won last year's Strands $100k Call for Recommender Start-Ups, and is a winner of the Red Herring 100 Europe award. Click here for more information about this session On a related note, check out the recent article I wrote, "Casual Rocket Scientists: An Interview with a Layman Leading the Netflix Prize, Martin Chabbert."