Recommendation and personalization systems are an important part of many modern websites. Graphs provide a natural way to represent the behavioral data that is the core input to many recommendation algorithms. Thomas Pinckney and his colleagues at Hunch (recently acquired by eBay) built a large scale recommendation system, and then ported the technology to eBay.

Thomas will be discussing how his team uses Cassandra to provide the high I/O storage of their fifty billion edge graphs and how they generate new recommendations in real time as users click around the site.