Rakuten Institute of Technology announces winner for Rakuten-Viki Global TV Recommender Challenge

The Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT) has awarded the first prize of the Rakuten-Viki Global TV Recommender Challenge to Team Merlion. According to the RIT, the winning team employed an elegant algorithm that performs outstandingly in both public and private leaderboards, identifies and engineers useful features, and which was able to discover and visualise some key insights from the data provided.

Source: Rakuten Institute of Technology. Team Merlion received their award and prizes from Masaya Mori (left), Global Head, Rakuten Institute of Technology. Team Merlion consists of Dr Rubing Duan, Data Scientist, Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) at A*STAR, Dr Liu Yong, Scientist, IHPC, Dr Yang Xulei, Research Scientist, Computing Science Department, IHPC, Dr Goh Siow Mong, Rick, Director, Computing Science Department, IHPC, Yong Kiam Tan, Research Engineer, attached to IHPC's Distributed Computing group, Dr Nan Hu,Scientist, Computing Science Department, IHPC and Zhen Zhou Wu, Research Engineer, Computing Science Department, IHPC.

Masaya Mori, Global Head, Rakuten Institute of Technology, and Executive Officer, Rakuten, presented the winning title, along with the grand cash prize of S$8,000, to Team Merlion. The first runner-up and second runner-up titles were awarded to Team Haipt and Team GM respectively.

Mori said the challenge received 567 submissions from across Asia. "In line with Rakuten’s goal of empowering businesses globally, we look forward to collaborating with our partners for future initiatives, to identify and nurture talent within the growing data science and internet services industry,” he said.

Adam Lyle, Chairman of Newton Circus, one of the judges, said: "The enthusiastic response from the data science community is testament to the growing talent in Singapore. The final presentations were truly impressive, and it is indeed heartening to see such a strong spirit of innovation and ingenuity in our community.”

Dr Nan Hu, a member of Team Merlion, said: “The Rakuten-Viki Global TV Recommender Challenge has been a thoroughly enriching experience for my teammates and I. We enjoyed the unique opportunity to test our problem-solving skills with a real-life business situation, and are thrilled that our efforts have paid off.”

Interested?

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post on the finals of the Rakuten-Viki Global TV Recommender Challenge
Read the TechTrade Asia blog post on the welcome address by the Economic Development Board of Singapore at the Challenge