A team of the Department of Informatics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki consisting of PhD students Eleftherios Spyromitros-Xioufis and Emmanouela Stachtiari, took the 2nd place in the “cold-start” task of the international contest ECML PKDD 2011 Discovery Challenge which was organized within the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD) 2011.

Goal of the contest was the development of recommendation system for the VideoLectures.Net video sharing platform. VideoLectures.Net is a free and open access multimedia repository of video lectures, mainly of research and educational character, aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing. Improving the current recommendation engine through the contest will facilitate the discovery of interesting content in the continuously growing collection of video-lectures.

The contest attracted a significant number of participants. In specific, 303 teams with 346 members took part in the contest with 62 teams actively participating in the “cold-start” task. In total, more than 2000 solutions were submitted. The distinction of the PhD students was accompanied by a 700 euro prize.