So I started working for Adversitement around 6 months ago. Adversitement is European market leader in the area of web analytics, and although fairly small in size it is a very active company.
My initial function is that of a technical consultant, with my activities consisting of helping our customers in making sure our analytics solutions measure what they are supposed to measure. I had no idea before, using only Google Analytics, but web analytics software can be huge. Our main product is Adobe Omniture and the functionality is pretty mind boggling. I’ve already gained quite a lot of experience in the pitfalls in web analytics, which keeps me aware of my development as an employee.
Apart from web analytics consultancy, Adversitement is pretty active in the development of new ideas and technology to make better use of web data. Which combines nicely with my somewhat different job description. Because next to being a consultant, I spend 1 day a week as a PhD student on the topic I’ve been graduating in. The main goal of my PhD track will be investigating to what extent recommender systems can benefit from a more theory driven perspective. From the time I’ve been studying recommender systems I have gotten the impression that the improvements in recommender systems from considering the challenges as purely numbercrunching problem are becoming smaller and more costly, while using the already available knowledge in a more theory driven fashion can improve performance significantly. The theory that I will be trying to combine come from the psychology of decision making and the area of research of social networking, supervised by Martijn Willemsen and Chris Snijders from TU/e. My aim is to do this by supervising grad students in their theses and using their input for my own research. Plenty of challenges, but I’m optimistic in finishing my dissertation within 6 years.
So this is how I look at it at the moment my work is starting to get shape. I think that this blog may be a good way to force myself to reflect on what I do from time to time, which is why I decided to revamp it.