Overstock.com Offers Cash for Innovation

Overstock.com and RichRelevance unveil 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. The RecLab Prize rewards the highest performing individual or team based on the results they are able to deliver within a defined judging period (up to $1 million for a 10 percent or greater lift).

 

"We are excited to support the academic research community, bringing state-of-the-art analytics to our business through our partners at RichRelevance," says 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."

 

RecLab Prize contestants gain immediate access to a high-quality and comprehensive synthetic dataset via RichRelevance's open-source RecLab project, a highly 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 (as real product recommendations to Overstock.com's customers).This approach enables 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.