Matchmaker Pune techie
By Asha

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Match.com is the biggest dating site in USA and the world.  It has 75 million members of which 2 million are paid members.  Slate did a feature on Match.com and apparently lots of its matching algorithms are done by a techie from Pune.  This is what is Slate article says

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A key recruit was Amarnath Thombre, a soft-spoken engineer from Pune, India. Thombre had attended the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, then taken an advanced degree in chemical engineering at the University of Arizona. Like his boss, he met the love of his life offline. His wife is also Indian, and they were introduced through family.

Yet Thombre says his experience at i2, where he spent years finding ways to move products around the country more efficiently, was perfect preparation for the online dating industry. And once at Match, he, Ginsberg and a team of nine maths ­whizzes hired by Thombre, set about updating the Match algorithm. "The one thing I knew was numbers and analytics, so we started building a numbers team here," he told me. "It's just supply and demand. The same principles work, no matter what kind of numerical problem you're solving."

The way the Match algorithm learns, he says, is similar to the way the human brain learns. "When you give it stimuli, it forms neural pathways," he says. "If you stop liking something, those shut off. It's learning as you go." The same principles are powering the recommendation engines at popular sites around the web. Amazon uses similar ­technology to recommend new products for people to buy, Pandora learns from likes and dislikes to customise its internet radio stations, and Netflix famously offered $1m to anyone who could improve the effectiveness of its algorithm by 10 per cent.

"With Netflix, people are constantly rating movies," Thombre told me. "But there's only one The Godfather, and you rate it once." Predicting preferences in human beings is altogether more complicated. "Even if you like The Godfather, The Godfather doesn't have to like you back," he said. "The whole problem of mutual matching makes the problem 10 times more complicated."
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