Find out about how Wayfair tackles product recommendations in our first installment!
Wayfair Data Science is composed of a number of sub-teams, each tackling a different set of specific business challenges. In order to give you a taste of the wide array of people and workstreams we have here on the data science team, we decided to film an explainer series showcasing some of our favorite projects and methods.
In each video, one of our data scientists will provide a quick introduction to a data science topic relating to their work at Wayfair about which they feel personally passionate. We keep the videos short and sweet, offering a broad and accessible introduction to the topic (without completely overlooking the technical details).
We hope that you will enjoy these videos as much as we enjoyed filming them. We will be posting bi-weekly, both here and on our new Wayfair Data Science YouTube channel, so please come back in 2 weeks for a new video!
This week, Vinny DeGenova will give a brief introduction to recommender systems. Wayfair uses this technology to generate personalized browser pages with listings for products customers may be interested in purchasing, based on their previous shopping habits. In this video, Vinny discusses what kind of recommender systems are out there, which ones we employ at Wayfair, and how we leverage these systems to curate helpful, personalized experiences for our customers.
Vinny has been on the Data Science team at Wayfair for two years, where he now leads the Product Recommendations team. During that time, he has primarily worked on recommender systems--ranging from content based methods and collaborative filtering, to deep learning based approaches. Vinny has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and has a background in Electrical Engineering from Boston University. Before joining Wayfair, Vinny was a Machine Learning Research Engineer at BAE Systems where he researched natural language processing techniques applied to military intelligence. In his free time, Vinny enjoys attending concerts, snowboarding, cooking, traveling, spending time with family and friends, and is a passionate New England Patriots fan.
