Wired Article

Thank you all who have sent suggestions as to how to improve my score on the Netflix prize as a result of reading about my attempts in the article in the latest edition of Wired. I'm very grateful and will incorporate any that I can figure out a way of converting into a computer program.

Just to say a little bit more about me. - I'm fascinated by the use of computers to understand how the mind works and how we can then use this knowledge to help predict human behaviour. The Netflix prize provides probably the largest dataset collected on human decision making that has been made publicly available. My attempts at the prize are based around a desire to understand how we can use such a dataset to better understand human decision making (and, of course, the outside chance of winning $1million).

My progress to date suggests that there is at least something in this approach and I'm open to offers to work on other datasets that incorporate a human decision making element - I currently have time available. As, an example, have a look at this company that I have helped setup recently, www.customerfusion.co.uk which aims to harness some of the learning from the Netflix competition to fuse market research data with customer information. Better still, if you have any market research data that you want to extract more value from - drop us an email.