Domonkos Tikk

After graduating from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), he earned a PhD in technical informatics from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME).
He worked as a research associate and project manager at the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics (TMIT) of BME until 2012; then he taught as an associate professor at Óbuda University (ÓE) for a year and a half.
As a researcher, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Murdoch University (Australia, 2000), Chonbuk National University (South Korea, 2001), and the University of Hull (United Kingdom, 2003). In 2008, he received a Humboldt Foundation Experienced Research Fellowship, which allowed him to spend 2 years at Humboldt University, Berlin.

He conducted scientific work in the field of fuzzy systems before 2000, in the field of text mining from 2001 to 2010, and from 2007 primarily in the field of recommender systems. He led numerous research projects in these professional areas.

He and his colleagues founded Gravity R&D Zrt. in 2007 to leverage their success and experience in the Netflix Prize competition, which focused on the business efficiency of recommendation systems, where they tied for first place. After several rounds of venture capital investment, the company achieved profitability under his leadership in 2014. The company was acquired by Taboola Inc., a listed company on the US stock exchange, in 2022.
He also continued his scientific activities in Gravity R&D. Under his leadership, the company participated in several international scientific projects, among which the CrowdRec FP7 (2013-2016), the EU enCOMPASS Horizon 2020 (2016-2019), and the 2021 domestic “Market RDI” projects stand out.

He is also active in the scientific community. He is a member of the ACM Recsys Steering Committee, the most important conference in the field of recommender systems, and was co-chair of the industry section in 2015 and program committee chair in 2019.
He is the (co-)author of more than 200 scientific papers and the author of several professional books in Hungarian and foreign languages.

Awards: Best Article Award (International Symposium on Computational Intelligence (E-ISCI 2002), Košice, Slovakia, 2002); Polák-Virág Publication Award (Hírkommunikations és Informatikai Szúdányos Egyesület (HTE), 2006); Kalmár Award (Neumann János Computer Science Society (NJSZT), 2008); Silver Badge Award (HTE, 2024). See further competition rankings and awards in the appendix below!