Gravity R&D

Gravity R&D
Private
Industry Software
Predecessor Reignsoft (asset deal)
Founded 2007 (2007)
Headquarters Budapest, Hungary
Number of locations
 San Jose, Tokyo, Győr
Area served
 Worldwide
Key people

Domonkos Tikk (CEO & Co-founder)
Kevin Jackson (Sales Director)
Viktor Gerő (Member of the board)
Bottyán Németh (Product Owner, co-founder)

István Pilászy (Head of Development, co-founder)
Products RECO for e-commerce
Services Software development
Total assets US$ 600,000 (Dec, 2009)[1] US$ 2 million (September, 2011) [2]
Owner Hungarian institutional strategic investors, Wojciech Uzdelewicz,[2] Founders
Number of employees
 30
Website GravityRD.com
GravityRD.jp

Gravity R&D (full name: Gravity Research & Development Zrt.) is an IT provider specialized in recommender systems. Gravity was founded by members of the Netflix Prize team "Gravity".

Gravity is based in Budapest with offices in San Jose and Győr, Hungary. Gravity has a subsidiary in Tokyo, Japan as well.

History

Netflix Prize

Further information: Netflix Prize

The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings. The prize would be awarded to the team achieving over 10% improvement over Netflix's own Cinematch algorithm.

The team "Gravity" was the front runner during January—May 2007.[3]

The leading position was achieved again in October 2007 in collaboration with the team "Dinosaur Planet" under the name "When Gravity and Dinosaurs Unite".

In January 2009, the two teams founded "Grand Prize Team" to initiate even wider collaboration, that resulted in being one of the leading teams throughout 2009.

On July 25, 2009 the team "The Ensemble", a merger of the teams "Grand Prize Team" and "Opera Solutions and Vandelay United", achieved a 10.10% improvement over Cinematch on the Quiz set.[4]

On September 18, 2009, Netflix announced team "BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos" as the prize winner, and the prize was awarded to the team in a ceremony on September 21, 2009.[5] "The Ensemble" team had in fact succeeded to match the winning "BellKor" team's result, but since "BellKor" submitted their results 20 minutes earlier, the rules award the prize to them.[6][7]

Details on the algorithms developed by the Gravity team can be found in their scientific publications.[8][9][10] Some algorithms are patented in the US.[11]

The data mining team of the company is actively doing research in the field of recommender systems and publish their recent results regularly.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]

Awards and recognition

Investors

Gravity raised in the first round over US$ 600.000.[1] The group of investors include Hungarian institutional strategic investors and Wojciech Uzdelewicz, an all-star analyst at Wall Street according to hedge funds,[2] former Managing Director of Duquesque Capital.[28]

A second round of financing was completed in September 2011, with PortfoLion investing US$ 2 million [2] in the company.

Since the first round investment, Gravity won customers among others in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, Brasil, Russia, France, UK, Poland, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Australia.[29]

Clients

Gravity has numerous notable clients including Dailymotion,[30] RCI,[31] Dunnhumby, Schibsted Media Group, and Naspers.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Gravity - Rock Solid Recommendations: among Europe’s Top 25 Most Innovative Start-ups, completes first financing round".
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Gravity - Rock Solid Recommendations completes second financing round".
  3. ↑ Hafner, Katie (June 4, 2007). "Netflix Prize Still Awaits a Movie Seer". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-03-07.
  4. ↑ "The Ensemble". 2009-07-25.
  5. ↑ "Grand Prize awarded to team BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos". Netflix Prize Forum. 2009-09-21.
  6. ↑ Steve Lohr (2009-09-21). "A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others". New York Times.
  7. ↑ "Mátrixfaktorizáció egymillió dollárért". Index. 2009-08-07.
  8. ↑ Takács, G. B.; Pilászy, I. N.; Németh, B. N.; Tikk, D. (2007). "Major components of the gravity recommendation system". ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 9 (2): 80. doi:10.1145/1345448.1345466.
  9. ↑ Gábor Takács; István Pilászy, Bottyán Németh, Domonkos Tikk (2007), "On the Gravity Recommendation System" (PDF), in Gábor Takács and István Pilászy and Bottyán Németh and Domonkos Tikk, Proc. KDD Cup Workshop at SIGKDD (PDF), San Jose, California, pp. 22–30, retrieved 2010-04-15 Cite uses deprecated parameter |coauthors= (help)
  10. ↑ Gábor Takács, István Pilászy, Bottyán Németh, Domonkos Tikk (2009), Scalable Collaborative Filtering Approaches for Large Recommender Systems (PDF)
  11. ↑ US patent 8676736, Pilaszy, et al., "Recommender systems and methods using modified alternating least squares algorithm", issued 2014-03-18
  12. ↑ István Pilászy, Domonkos Tikk (2009), Recommending new movies: even a few ratings are more valuable than metadata
  13. ↑ István Pilászy, Dávid Zibriczky, Domonkos Tikk (2010), Fast ALS-based matrix factorization for explicit and implicit feedback datasets
  14. ↑ Gábor Takács, István Pilászy, Domonkos Tikk (2011), Applications of the conjugate gradient method for implicit feedback collaborative filtering
  15. ↑ Balázs Hidasi, Domonkos Tikk (2012), Fast ALS-Based Tensor Factorization for Context-Aware Recommendation from Implicit Feedback
  16. ↑ Gábor Takács, Domonkos Tikk (2012), Alternating least squares for personalized ranking
  17. ↑ Balázs Hidasi, Domonkos Tikk (2013), Context-aware item-to-item recommendation within the factorization framework
  18. ↑ Alan Said, Domonkos Tikk, Paolo Cremonesi (2014), Benchmarking
  19. ↑ Balázs Hidasi, Domonkos Tikk (2014), Approximate modeling of continuous context in factorization algorithms
  20. ↑ "ACM Recommender Systems 2008 - Home". Recsys.acm.org. 2008-10-23. Retrieved 2010-05-02.
  21. ↑ "Strands Blog " Instant personalized TV entertainment developer, Gravity R&D, winner of the Strands $100k Call for Recommender Start-Ups". Blog.strands.com. Retrieved 2010-05-02.
  22. ↑ http://www.supertext.ch/info/wp-content/themes/supertext/images/news/redherring_europe_finalists_2009.pdf
  23. ↑ "Europe Unlimited". E-unlimited.com. 1999-12-04. Retrieved 2010-05-02.
  24. ↑ "ICMA Innovation Award 2012". ICMA. Retrieved 4 May 2012.
  25. ↑ "RecSys 2012 - Awards and Honorable Mentions".
  26. ↑ "CrowdRec".
  27. ↑ "GravityRD, Intellisen, Maven7 and Prezi are Showing the Innovation Potential of the V4 region".
  28. ↑ "Wojtek Uzdelewicz, Managing Director of Duquesque Capital".
  29. ↑ "Netflix Prize Runner-up unveils programming recommendations technology". ITVT. 2010-04-13.
  30. ↑ "Előre megmondják, hogy milyen videót fogsz nézni". index.hu. 2014-08-29.
  31. ↑ Know What They Like, Recommend What They Want, RCI Ventures, March 2012

External links

Coordinates: 47°29′38″N 19°07′21″E / 47.494013°N 19.122559°E / 47.494013; 19.122559

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