Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Amazon.com: Truly Data Driven

Another interesting talk at University of Washington, this time by Dennis Lee from Amazon.com.
    Amazon.com has grown from a small bookseller to a place where you can literally find discover and buy almost anything. As we have grown, we have learned key lessons by leveraging the data that our customers provide to us: where they click, what they search for, and what they buy. I will go over the evolution of our software platform from the early days to today. I will then highlight several areas across the company where we use data in interesting ways that reveal very rich yet unintuitive behavior.
The talk will be broadcast live on the internet at 3:30pm (PDT) on Oct 28 and archived a few days afterward.

Update: The archive for this talk is finally available. I watched the first part of it live, but then got booted off because of heavy traffic. Guess it was a popular talk. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of it.

Update: The talk was surprisingly light, more of an introduction to Amazon and its features than a technical talk about data mining. The section on A/B testing (the tests used to determine the impact of design changes and new features) was good and might be particularly interesting to many. There also was a quick overview of some personalization features and supply chain optimizations.

No comments: