Theodore Meynard
Theodore Meynard is a data science manager at GetYourGuide.He leads the evolution of their ranking algorithm, helping customers to find the best activities to book and locations to explore. Beyond work, he is one of the co-organizers of the Pydata Berlin meetup and the conference. When he is not programming, he loves riding his bike and looking for the best bakery-patisserie in town.
Session
[Cold start](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_start_(recommender_systems) is a critical bottleneck for marketplaces: new items lack behavioral signals and reviews, so ranking models under-expose them, delaying the very signals needed to rank them well. This talk shares practical solutions developed at scale for a travel marketplace, including guaranteed exposure at key positions, efficient real-time re-ranking under latency constraints, and targeted boosting for unactivated items. Attendees will learn how experiment-driven iteration shaped a robust system that accelerates early traction for new items without sacrificing overall marketplace health.