Graded Discussion Assignment 1

Please read the following points thoroughly before you start your discussion assignment.

Your grades will depend upon the contents/quality (not the quantity) of your posts.
Your grades for the discussion assignment will depend upon your efforts, depth,
novelty/innovation and presentation of your posts. Hence, please try to make thoughtful
posts with adequate justifications. Posts such as I agree or I think so too will not be
counted as posts.
Please ensure that you have read and understood in-depth about the material presented in
the paper.
For this assignment, you are required to do an online search to find out more contextual
information. However, when you use information from any given website/link or any other
material (online or otherwise), please definitely cite the relevant website/link/material.
You are required to make at least three posts for the discussion topic that you are engaging
in. You are free to create more posts than the minimum required three posts, but please take
care not to post unnecessarily just to increase your number of posts. Remember that your
grades will not depend upon the number of posts that you do.
Each post should be concise and not exceeding 100 words. If you are citing any relevant
websites/links in your post, those will not be counted towards the 100-word limit.
This discussion assignment is open-ended by design; the purpose of this assignment is to
provide you with some experience about reading research papers and will also stimulate you
to think creatively about applying data analytics
The discussions close on April 3, 2017 at 3 pm IST. This is a hard deadline and will NOT be
extended.
This discussion assignment will contribute to 5% of your overall grade.

Topic for discussion:

Download the paper from the following URL: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~samir/498/Amazon-

Recommendations.pdf

The above paper is regarded as a seminal paper; it will facilitate towards broadening your perspective
about how data analytics is used in the real world by Amazon. Incidentally, collaborative filtering and
clustering are used by many other firms as well in several important and diverse domains.

Please ensure that you spend time on reading the paper thoroughly; you may need to read the paper
multiple times to understand the contents of the paper thoroughly. Then you can proceed towards
discussing the paper.

Possible discussion points may include (but are not limited to) the following:

In Page 2, observe that cosine similarity measure has been used. What other similarity
measures can you think of? Justify and discuss trade-offs between your suggested similarity
measure and the cosine similarity measure.
Comment on the potential accuracy of the approaches used in the paper. Are the approaches
100% accurate? Point out scenarios where the algorithms would fail or generate inaccurate
results. In essence, what are the limitations of the algorithms proposed in the paper?
 Discuss scalability issues, especially w.r.t. increasing number of customers/users and more
fine-grained preferences.
Are there issues of semantics associated with the way in which users express their respective
preferences?
Point out applications of this approach in any domain of your choice. Examples of domains
include smart cities, transportation, finance, healthcare education and so on. How would you
extend these algorithms to apply to the domain of your choice? What additional challenges
would you encounter in that domain?
After going through the Conclusion section, point out how you can add value by using these
algorithms to reduce costs, increase revenue and so on.
Discuss any privacy implications as well as other socio-cultural implications of deploying these
algorithms.
Discuss data collection aspects and data reliability.

These are just some examples of points for discussion; you can feel free to include other relevant
discussion points. Furthermore, from your discussion posts, I should be able to understand that
you have indeed read and understood the paper.