Planning to Netflix & Chill this weekend? The movie you choose to watch may be heavily influenced by Netflix’s sophisticated algorithms. Similarly, decisions like where you choose to dine and what you choose to wear are increasingly facilitated by predictive technologies powered by deep learning.
Here are five ways that popular consumer tech companies Netflix, Yelp, Yahoo, Stitch Fix and Google improve your online experience with artificial intelligence.
Applications of Deep Learning In Digital Consumer Products
1. Netflix Dynamically Personalizes Layouts & Movie Thumbnails
Historically, watching television is a uni-directional communication channel. You receive the content, but give no feedback to the content producers. With digital streaming, your watch history, mouse clicks, and search terms all enable Netflix to learn your preferences and deliver more relevant content.
In 2009, the Netflix awarded their $1 million Netflix Prize in an open competition for external programming teams to improve upon the company’s internal ratings prediction system. The winning team beat the original algorithm by over 10%.
Since then, the introduction of more advanced machine learning algorithms allows Netflix to achieve new levels of prediction and personalization in rankings, layout, catalog, new member onboarding, and more. Tony Jebara, Director at Netflix and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia, explained at REWORK’s Deep Learning Summit in SF how Netflix not only recommends better movies, but predicts better thumbnail images for each individual user.
Traditionally, optimizing images on a website involves A/B testing two alternatives over a period of time. The problem with this method is that you have to painfully wait to collect data before arriving at the optimal decision. During this period, portions of your audience are experiencing the suboptimal variants of your test. This loss of experience is called “regret.”
To minimize regret, Netflix employs dynamic adaptive tests such as the multi-arm bandit model. Such models are able to shift traffic to the best performing creatives dynamically during a test and mathematically reduce regret.
What counts as “better” differs between people, so Netflix also takes into account your consumption profile to perform personalized explore / exploit optimization. If you often watch comedy, they’ll use Robin Williams for the cover of Good Will Hunting. If you love romantic chick flicks, they’ll feature Matt Damon kissing Minnie Driver instead.
2. Yelp Surfaces The Most Beautiful Photos For Any Venue
A picture is worth a thousand words. When you’re trying to pick a romantic spot that will impress your OKCupid date, you’ll want to know if the food is plated nicely and the ambience sets the right mood. To help you make the right restaurant choices, Alex Miller and his team at Yelp employed deep learning algorithms to highlight the best user photographs.
While metrics such as number of likes and clickthroughs can be useful to evaluate photos, they can also be thrown off by clickbait or happenstance. A better solution would be to judge a photo based on inherent content and characteristics – such as depth of field, contrast, and alignment – but with 25 million MAU (monthly active users) uploading thousands of photos to Yelp every day, no staff of human evaluators would suffice.
At the Startup ML conference in San Francisco, Miller described how his engineering team used CNNs (convolutional neural networks) to build a photo scoring model. A good proxy for beautiful photos is whether or not they were taken by a DSLR, which can be discovered easily by examining a photo’s EXIF metadata.
Miller’s team leveraged this fact to create scalable training data sets using DSLR images as positive examples and non-DSLR images as negative examples. Deep learning algorithms learned the qualities of good photos from the training data set and could apply these learnings to all photos, whether taken with DSLR or not.
In addition to the photo quality score, the team also added strategic filters and diversification logic, so that a restaurant famous for a particular dish or feature wouldn’t have their top 10 photo results all be of the same subject.
The results speak for themselves:
You can read more about Miller’s technical process on the Yelp engineering blog. Also relevant is a blog post by Miller’s colleague Wei-Hong Chuang on how Yelp classifies each photo into categories like food, drink, outdoor shot, indoor shot, etc.
3. Yahoo Ensures You Pick The Best Emoji For Any Situation
For lazy texters, emojis are the easiest way to say so much with so little. But with over 1,800 possible emoji choices, how can you be sure you’re picking the perfect one for exactly what you want to say?
This is the problem Stacey Svetlichnaya, a machine learning engineer at Yahoo, aims to solve. When a user composes or responds to a message, what emojis should show up in the autocomplete suggestions? Ideally you want to predict the top five emojis that a user is likely to select.
Emoji usage is highly dynamic. Some are used to replace words with images, others are used to express emotion, and yet more have bizarre cultural uses. For example, the goat emoji is often used to mean “greatest of all time.”
An additional challenge is that emojis differ in visual style across platforms, leading to misinterpretations.
Svetlichnaya and the Yahoo Vision & Machine Learning Team tested three different approaches: 1) FastText, a fast linear classifier, 2) LSTM, a type of recurrent neural network architecture, and 3) WordCNN, a convolutional net approach that balances performance and complexity. Of the three, FastText was not surprisingly the winner on speed, but humans preferred the LSTM results.
Yahoo isn’t the only company applying machine learning to emojis. Back in 2015, Instagram Engineering published a fascinating series by engineer Thomas Dimson called “Emojineering: Machine Learning For Emoji Trends.”
4. Stitch Fix Finds You The Perfect Fashion Faster
Being fashionable is hard, but Stitch Fix makes styling effortless. The personal styling startup lets you personalize your style profile and get hand-picked clothing and accessories sent to your door every month.
Defining style can be a nebulous affair. After all, how can you tell if a particular shirt counts as “urban boho chic” or that a dress is “sexy but not too slutty”? Christopher Moody has several ideas.
Moody is a Data Scientist at Stitch Fix with a background in statistics, astrophysics, and high-performance computing. Turns out these nerdy skills are now in-demand in the fashion world.
Many deep learning models are opaque black boxes where you can’t easily understand why an algorithm came to a particular conclusion. Moody’s research focuses on improving model interpretability so that human experts can give feedback on the relative performance of the algorithms.
One method is to use t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding), a dimensionality reduction method that helps visualize similar objects. Many deep learning models use high-dimensional data which is impossible for a human to conceptualize. Dimensionality reduction methods flatten complicated data into two or three dimensional scatter plots that are much easier to understand.
Moody is also big fan of the k-SVD method. k-SVD is a generalization of the k-means clustering method. In high-level non-technical terms, cluster analysis involves grouping together objects that have similar properties. Once distinct clusters have been identified, a human expert can examine the groups to see if they exhibit any unifying features and add appropriate labels such as “tank tops” or “statement pieces.”
5. Google’s Machine Translation Approaches Human Levels
In September 2016, Google announced they were replacing older methods for machine translation with neural network architectures. Previously Google Translate leveraged a statistical method called phrase-based machine translation (PBMT) which breaks sentences into words and phrases to be translated separately.
PBMT methods often produce grammatically clunky sentences, especially if the input and output languages differ dramatically in their structure, such as Chinese to English. Compensating for these quirks requires additional engineering complexity and effort.
The new GNMT (Google Neural Machine Translation) system uses RNNs (recurrent neural networks) to map entire input sentences in one language to an output sentence in another language. This reduces code complexity while maintaining speed and improving performance. In some cases, such as French to English, the GNMT architecture is closing in on human translators.
If you want to understand the technical evolution of the GNMT and how Google’s team iteratively improved upon the design and performance, read Stephen Merity’s visual guide to the process.
AI Permeates All Aspects Of Our Digital Lives
Many consumers don’t realize how significant artificial intelligence is in improving the user experience of digital products. Traditional statistical models of predicting optimal experiences are dramatically enhanced by recent breakthroughs in big data, computational power, and deep neural network architectures. More and more companies will have to adopt these methodologies to stay competitive.
Are there any products or technology you use every day that you would like us to explain? Let us know in the comments below.
Smithqdq says
There are huge networks of catfishers who pretend romantic relationships utilizing stolen photographs so as to rip-off folks out of money. There are several in style free relationship websites that cater specifically to sexual relationships, resembling Plenty of Fish (POF), OkCupid, and Tinder. Free returns can be found for the shipping address you selected. Our Ukraine private investigator know these are emotionally delicate situations and bring a compassion to your case that is absolutely vital. You do not know what you do not know. If there’s one professional that even the staunchest of critics can’t argue with, it’s the observe record of online relationship apps. Even when you think the cons outweigh the professionals, it’s good to vary up the 2-person dynamic. While it’s nice to have so many fish in the sea-it can be a bit exhausting having to weed out the good from the bad. These tech masterpieces have helped tens of millions of single women and men find love all through their many years of existence.
You might want to seek out out if that is necessary to you-or if you are simply as happy outdoors the bounds of monogamy. In one video on his Instagram web page, he films himself opening a “money gun” which shoots out financial institution notes. No matter whether or not you are going out for a protracted and leisurely dinner or simply heading to their condominium for a quick hookup, you will probably want to maintain a number of nights open each week. Beta is now open for NY and the Tristate space. A confiscation order totalling £179,000 was made at Worcester Crown Court. A man accused of a £180,000 online dating scam feigned laryngitis over the telephone to dupe a financial institution into giving him a loan in his girlfriend’s title, a court docket has heard. Ms Fowkes was eventually alerted to the scam by the Economic Crime Unit of West Mercia Police, her native drive. A North Yorkshire lady who lost greater than £300,000 in an online dating scam has spoken to the BBC about her expertise.
The woman thought she was corresponding with a man called Christian Anderson, and she gave him cash to fund a supposed business venture. At Ojo’s dwelling they discovered a laptop containing data of the victim’s dialog and a “seduction equipment” together with the poetry e-book For My Soulmate and a relationship guide called The sport. What does it imply when a man tells you he hasn’t called as a result of he misplaced his cellphone? What does ‘religion’ mean to a Jehovah’s Witness? Is it true that Jehovah’s Witnesses shouldn’t associate with latamdate.com non-witnesses? The service focuses on determining if an individual has been caught on other websites catfishing folks. Once you engage in sexting, you’re exchanging sexually specific messages, photographs, or movies with one other particular person. We may also help with three completely different classes of missing persons: the primary is a one that has left their location voluntarily; the second is a person who has left their location voluntarily, however who’s harder to hint, and the third is a one that has left their location towards their will, resembling with abductions and kidnappings. The very fact it says he left implies that he was one earlier than he left.
Robin Longmore, financial intelligence officer at West Mercia Police, was the one who first identified Ms Fowkes was being conned. Take notes and re-consider who it is that you really want. I suggest you connect and chat with individuals that you may not consider are who you want. Move slowly in communication with different individuals is prudent. He warned folks to be “extremely cautious” of any request for money from online contacts. You achieve one thing concrete by staying dwelling to do the laundry. Change those criteria in your on-line profile; so to spend more time chatting and messaging. PS in immediate messaging often stands for “postscript” and is used so as to add a further message or thought after the primary message has been sent. So, why would or not it’s at all weird to make use of on-line apps and instruments to find love? Curious why everyone and their mom is ranting and raving about on-line relationship? Trying to find online dating tips? While this like isn’t a lot of a shock, sadly, many customers do lie on their online courting profiles. The information delivered after conducting a search is aggregated based mostly on public information and profiles from various platforms including social media profiles. 1. Blindsided by your preferences: Most on-line profiles focuses on attributes of potential dates or what you suppose you need from the other partner as a substitute of a shared value system.
Danieltgc says
Online dating has now gradually become popular for individuals to discover and satisfy a special someone for eventual relationship, especially when they have joined a leading dating site. No concerns now, you can relate to countless individuals from throughout the globe through complimentary online chats. A number of totally free online dating sites even inquire more distinctive concerns, for example your suggestion of a romantic date or whether you remain in search of a casual relation or marriage. Nobody likes to date an individual who can’t even talk correctly. Because of the numerous online dating websites readily available in the Internet today, a lot of people can now utilize them to look for a suitable date or perhaps a partner for life. This is the easiest opportunity for a lot of individuals to meet other members from different walks of life. But now a day’s people have actually improved their thoughts and now comprehend intents of individuals behind developing this profile. The web is no longer simply a source of information and entertainment – we invest more time in the cyber world now than ever in the past. Aside from this, they also provide fast delivery of their services and can be accessed at anytime of the day and anywhere in the world.
A variety of complimentary online dating services will allow you rapid interaction or post on an online forum with your member daters. Don’t post to Facebook how upset you are or that your ex’s brand-new companion is a home-wrecker. There are various online dating Website readily available for you to choose. The characteristics of complimentary dating websites make the plan and service providers extremely favored by the charmdate.com possible customers. The site also has a myriad of interaction and personal privacy alternatives that make it possible to keep your profile private to a select couple of, or make it possible for many members to call you if they have an interest in taking things further. Taking these precautions can help provide you the convenience you require to make sure that you have a safe and satisfying first date. Never lie about your physical look and never ever provide phony descriptions. Do not Lie About Your Age: You can easily develop a fake profile on online dating sites however what purpose would it serve.
Do not lie about your age if you want to discover yourself a compatible partner. Some people particularly the grownups are led to believe that they can not any longer find true love at their age. A lot of adult and single individuals have actually been effective in browsing for their future partners through the several dating services discovered in the Internet. The majority of free online dating services allow you to send several photographs, to be revealed to the possible matches. A good profile is one which shows the sort of person you are. Several online dating websites have come up in the recent years so you should check out them to discover the one which matches your needs. Searching for global dating websites to find Christian singles? Searching for love online? There are over 39.7 million users with 8 million active users daily who are looking for relationships, dating, and more. Conditional on the online dating website, it permits you to go into basic exploration definitive elements for example age, qualities, and whether you’re searching for a male or female. Most of totally free online dating service assist you compose the profile by inquiring crucial questions for example age, stature, gender, place, favorite pastimes, and interests.
The majority of free online dating services have their specific special or trademarked name for judgment. Free online dating websites generally advance similar services. Once you have actually chosen the site or websites that you like you first have to register yourself there. Dislikes and likes: List what you like and what you dislike rather writing “I dislike liars, I dislike cheaters and I hate cigarette smokers”. You can view the full list of online dating safety ideas at Get Safe Online. Also, when you sign up with a fully grown dating site, members are guaranteed that security steps are carried out to avoid others from easily opening their profile page and read their individual details as well as see their photographs. You should not expose any individual information in your profile. Proper grooming is a basic suggestion that you must observe. If you need to stick out from the crowd you need to have something distinct on your profile.