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Overstock.com and RichRelevance offer $1 million prize in research contest

May 11, 2011

Overstock.com and RichRelevance, an e-commerce company, today unveiled the RecLab Prize on Overstock.com. The prize provides a cash award totaling up to $1 million to the researcher or research team who can achieve a measurable lift over existing product recommendations in a wide variety of shopping contexts on Overstock.com.

RecLab Prize contestants gain immediate access to a dataset via RichRelevance's open-source RecLab project, a scalable platform for research code. The RecLab approach enables researchers to develop their algorithms against synthetic data and then test against real data.

Top performing algorithms will be exposed to real data and will run live within the RichRelevance cloud environment. The approach allows researchers to solve a real-world problem with real-world constraints, while never exposing data to an outside system, thereby preserving data security and eliminating privacy concerns.

"We are excited to support the academic research community, bringing state-of-the-art analytics to our business through our partners at RichRelevance," said Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. "This is a phenomenal opportunity to benefit our customers, who will get early, exclusive access to the most advanced recommendations possible through the participation of top educational and research institutions worldwide."

A board of judges, including senior engineers at RichRelevance, Overstock.com and members of the machine learning community will determine the prize winners. In order to win the $1 million prize, a researcher or team must deliver at least a 10 percent lift over existing product recommendations on Overstock.com.

If no one in the round hits the goal, then the judges will award a pro-rated prize to the team who achieves the highest lift. For example, if the winning team achieves an 8 percent lift, it will receive $800,000.

Should the winning team be affiliated with an educational institution, RichRelevance and Overstock.com will grant a separately funded Institution Prize valued at 25 percent of the winning prize to the educational institution. The RecLab Prize is also open globally to non-commercial teams.