Today it’s sunny in Copenhagen so it would be a great day for starting to collect data for an ice cream vendor recommender system. What you need is a lot of ratings of different ice-cream shops. Maybe some data on which types of ice-cream they sell, and whether they have seats and such.

Then you can spend the days where it’s too hot to be outside on reading about how to handle geodata and then how to implement the recommender systems.

You can implement a content-based recommender using the data on the vendor for suggesting similar places for people planning a trip, and use a “learning to rank” algorithm to combine ratings and position into recommendations for users on the move.

Incidentally, today is a good start to on such a project because Manning has a deal of today on “Geoprocessing with Python” which means you can get it at half price off today, and tomorrow you will find the same deal for my book “Practical Recommender systems“. Go and have an ice-cream and think about it.

And if you do it, please let me know how it went!