Some Information About Me

I am currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Prior to that I worked at Qualcomm Inc, Packet Video, Enerdyne Technologies, Stanilite Electronics and Media Technology. I have over 15 years experience designing state of the art commercial and military systems in the telecommunications and aerospace industries. I have a B.Sc. (Hons) Degree from the University of Western Australia. During my honours year I conducted research in Neural Networks.

I have been participating in the Netflix Challenge on a parttime basis since May, 2007. My highest ranking was 7th place. At the end of the contest I finished in 15th place, however, I finished in third place out of all the single person teams.

I am also a member of the Ensemble team. Our team finished in first place in the Quiz dataset, tied on the Test dataset but ended up in second place behind Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos due to having sent our submission twenty minutes later. So I can confidently say that there is no existing movie recommendation system in the world better than ours!

Currently some of us from the Ensemble are investigating potential business opportunities in areas where we can apply the technology and expertise we developed as part of the Netflix challenge.

I can be contacted at cesbertino at yahoo dot com.

Welcome

Hi,

My name is Ces Bertino (cesbertino at yahoo <.> com). I cracked into the top ten in April, but unfortunately (for me), a month or so later, another team booted me out. No ill feelings, but I live in California, and as our Governor likes to say "I'll Be BACK!" (I think..., I hope ...).
I use an Intel Quad Core PC with 4 GB of RAM. I usually try to put in one to two hours per day, trying to balance time between my great family, my day job and this contest.

Good luck to all the teams, as long as you have less luck than me!!!