In recent years, breakthroughs in sample-efficient RL algorithms like Contextual Bandits enabled new solutions to personalization and optimization scenarios. Unbiased off-policy evaluation gave Data Scientists superpowers on real-world data volumes, giving them confidence in putting machine learning into production. Vowpal Wabbit is an open source machine learning toolkit and research platform, used extensively across the industry, providing fast, scalable machine learning.

Personalizer, an Azure Cognitive Service, powered by Vowpal Wabbit, aims to democratize real world reinforcement learning for content personalization.

Come and learn about reinforcement learning, the theory behind contextual bandits and how this applies to content personalization:

- Quick introduction into Vowpal Wabbit and contextual bandits learning
- How to succeed using Vowpal Wabbit
- What is new in Vowpal Wabbit 9
- Keeping up with Azure Personalizer