Predictive Analytics for Customer-Centric Commerce at eBay

Commerce is at an inflection point where customers expect better and easier experiences both online and offline. They expect individualized experiences, while at the same time demand that their privacy is safeguarded. This presentation will introduce personalization and recommendation in the realm of e-commerce platforms with a focus on scale. An effective approach is a data-driven process, that would need to combine multiple data sources, deal with billions of events, offline & online, and ensure high availability.

Ranjan Sinha is head of data science engineering & technology at eBay Inc., where he leads projects on customer analytics and personalization. Earlier, as lead data scientist, he led multiple business impacting projects in recommendations and personalization that has significantly enhanced consumers’ shopping experiences. Prior to eBay, Dr. Sinha was a research academic at the University of Melbourne and holds a PhD in computer science from RMIT University, Australia. He has published over 30 works, including in top-tier venues such as IEEE Big Data, VLDB, and ACM SIGMOD. He won the sort benchmark for both JouleSort and PennySort and was amongst Wall Street Journal’s top-12 Asia-Pacific young inventors. He regularly speaks on data science, big data technologies, and co-organizes the popular Bay Area Search Meetup.