Our purpose at WW (the new Weight Watchers) is to "inspire healthy habits for real life. For people, families, communities, the world - for everyone." For 56 years, we’ve been a leader in weight loss. Now, however, our mission is bigger and broader: drive health and wellness, making healthy habits accessible to all, not just a few. The question is, how do you deliver on that? Humans are notoriously fickle, stubborn, and irrational. They don’t always do what is in their best interests. Moreover, behavioral change and habit forming is genuinely hard. It is all too easy to skip going to the gym, to resist that extra cookie, or to take time for yourself and reduce stress.

In this session, we’ll discuss what’s involved in behavioral change and nudges, and how the WW data science team are working on personalized experiences, various recommenders, and other data products at scale to aid our members’ success.

BIOGRAPHY Carl Anderson is the Director, Data Science at WW, the new Weight Watchers, in New York. His team builds predictive models and data products such as churn models, social network recommenders, search improvements, and food recommenders, all to inspire healthy habits among our millions of members around the world, as well as to positively impact their families and their communities. Passionate about all thing data, he is the author of the 2015 O’Reilly book "Creating a Data-Driven Organization".

HealthRecSys’19, September 20, 2019, Copenhagen, Denmark © 2019 Copyright for the individual papers remains with the authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.