Tag: Recommendations

Finding Books for Prisoners

I had an interesting night from volunteering at Inside Books Project, the only books-to-prisoners program in Texas. Every month, the volunteers receive about 2,000 letters. For each letter, they find books that the person would enjoy and write a reply.

I started seeing parallels with what I do for work and became intrigued by 3 things: the abundance of math in finding books for prisoners, the absence of order and technology to help me find books, and the heuristics that I ended up using instead.

Continue reading “Finding Books for Prisoners”

Metric and Probability-Based Recommendations

How many of you like to eat, play, and most importantly, drink? (Hopefully, everyone!)

I helped create an app called LocALL. It gives 50,000 recommendations for short trips to eat, play, and drink and support local businesses in Austin. We can extend our app to cover ~400 metropolitan cities in the US and create 20 million recommendations. (Big data and machine learning!)

At the heart of our solution is math. We used spherical geometry and probability to create simple, fast recommendations.

Continue reading “Metric and Probability-Based Recommendations”