Personalizing Our Diner Communications at Grubhub

When: Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM

RSVP: Not required

Speaker: Wai Gen Yee, Grubhub

Host: Dr. Carlos Ordonez

I will talk about some ways we personalize our treatments to diners, including with recommendations as well as in our marketing communications.  We have tens of thousands of restaurants and millions of menu items and matching diners with the right product at the right time is critical.  Our current stack uses popular tools such as Amazon EMR and various Python packages like Gensim, allowing us to build models within a few hours. Some topics covered include recommendations, collaborative filtering, neural networks (embeddings), and lift modeling.

Bio:

Wai Gen Yee is currently the Head of Data Science at Grubhub where he focuses on the design and measurement of marketing initiatives. He was previously Chief Data Scientist at Sears focsed on pricing and promotions, and prior to that, Chief Scientist at Orbtiz focused on website personalization. Yee spent some time in academia as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech and B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.