Presenters: Lucas Kelly and Lourdes Siman
Stories connect a person to a world that seems far away; a world filled with tigers, pandas and great blue whales. It is this connection between people and the natural world that drives so much of what we do at the World Wildlife Fund. The question is, how do we make the right connections with the right people? How do we personalize the web visitor's experience so that this connection has the greatest impact? In this presentation, WWF data scientists will detail how our partnership with SAS has allowed us to recommend specific stories to segments of our web visitor population. Using recommendation engines served through CI360 applications, we can present ocean lovers with ocean stories, forest dwellers with topics about the trees, and wildlife protectors with facts about tigers. We will explain how we advanced from out-of-the-box recommenders to innovative customized recommendation systems (Factorization Machines and Bayesian Personalized Ranking) using SAS Viya. Finally, we will detail how natural language processing of SAS 360 Discover data allowed us to cater these recommendation engines to specific segments, keeping our visitors on our website for longer periods of time and increasing the probability of meeting organizational goals. Join us as we show you how a story of a tiger in India can function as an entry point into a world of conservation.
