Sep 21, 2009 - Claremont, Calif. -

Mathematics alumnus Robert Bell ’72 is a member of a multinational team that has won the $1 million Netflix Prize. Team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” (made up of teams BellKor of AT&T Labs, New Jersey, and BigChaos of Austria) has created the best recommendation software to accurately predict the movies Netflix customers would like.

Netflix initiated the global competition in October 2006 to improve by 10 percent its movie matching system, which spans the 100,000 DVD titles in its catalog. The contest generated entries from more than 2,500 teams. Team BellKor, made up of Robert Bell ’72 and Chris Volinsky from the Statistics Research Group in AT&T Labs, and former AT&T employee Yehuda Koren, won the first two $50,000 Progress Prizes that served as incentive for competitors. BellKor earned the best score at the competition’s one-year anniversary with an improvement of 8.43 percent. At year two, they achieved the top spot by collaborating with BigChaos of Austria (in 81st place at year one) to achieve a 9.44 percent improvement.

Bell has worked at AT&T for over 10 years doing data analysis and model building for a variety of AT&T projects and theoretical research for academia.

According to the Netflix website: “The Netflix Prize sought to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences. On September 21, 2009 we awarded the $1M Grand Prize to team ‘BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos.’ Read about their algorithm, checkout team scores on the Leaderboard, and join the discussions on the Forum.

“We applaud all the contributors to this quest, which improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.”

Read the spring 2009 HMC Magazine article

Read the Los Angeles Times article

Read the New York Times article