Netflix Prize - Progress Over The Years

Progress Over The Years

The competition began on October 2, 2006. By October 8, a team called WXYZConsulting had already beaten Cinematch's results.

By October 15, there were three teams who had beaten Cinematch, one of them by 1.06%, enough to qualify for the annual progress prize. By June 2007 over 20,000 teams had registered for the competition from over 150 countries. 2,000 teams had submitted over 13,000 prediction sets.

Over the first year of the competition, a handful of front-runners traded first place. The more prominent ones were:

• WXYZConsulting, a team of Yi Zhang and Wei Xu. (A front runner during Nov-Dec 2006.)
• ML@UToronto A, a team from the University of Toronto led by Prof. Geoffrey Hinton. (A front runner during parts of Oct-Dec 2006.)
• Gravity, a team of four scientists from the Budapest University of Technology (A front runner during Jan-May 2007.)
• BellKor, a group of scientists from AT&T Labs. (A front runner since May 2007.)

On August 12, 2007, many contestants gathered at the KDD Cup and Workshop 2007, held at San Jose, California. During the workshop all four of the top teams on the leaderboard at that time presented their techniques. The team from IBM Research — Yan Liu, Saharon Rosset, Claudia Perlich, and Zhenzhen Kou — won the third place in Task 1 and first place in Task 2.

Over the second year of the competition, only three teams reached the leading position:

• BellKor, a group of scientists from AT&T Labs. (front runner during May 2007 - Sept 2008.)
• BigChaos, a team of Austrian scientists from commendo research & consulting (single team front runner since Oct 2008)
• BellKor in BigChaos, a joint team of the two leading single teams (A front runner since Sept. 2008)