Michael Skinner, the resident “Data Whisperer” at Duetto, hospitality’s only Revenue Strategy Platform, placed first in the 2018 Rakuten Data Challenge and has been invited to present at the 2018 SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce, July 12 in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The competition, organized as part of the 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, tasked data scientists with developing a large-scale taxonomy classification to accurately predict the category of hundreds of thousands of individual products in a sample e-commerce catalog. As the winner of the Data Challenge, Skinner will showcase his findings — including the “Balanced Pooling Views” method he developed — at a poster session during SIGIR 2018.