Interviews & Essays
Chip Huyen: AI that adapts to changing conditions
Until recently, big data processing has been dominated by batch systems like MapReduce and Spark, which allow us to periodically process a large amount of data very efficiently.
Recommendation
Tech & Society
Governments Lay Down the Law: Governments around the world increasingly regulate AI.
Legislators worldwide wrote new laws — some proposed, some enacted — to rein in societal impacts of automation.What happened: Authorities at all levels ratcheted up regulatory pressure as
Tech & Society
What Makes TikTok Tick: Leaked info reveals how TikTok's algorithm works.
A leaked document gave reporters a glimpse of what makes TikTok’s renowned recommender algorithm so effective.
Science
Which Drug Helps Your Depression?: AI System Matches Patients With the Right Depression Drug
Deep learning can predict how patients will respond to two antidepressant medicines.
Tech & Society
How Facebook Fills the Feed: Leaked Documents Show How Facebook's Algorithm Works
Facebook’s recommendation algorithm is a closely guarded secret. Newly leaked documents shed light on the company’s formula for prioritizing posts in an individual user’s feed.
Tech & Society
Search Goes Multimodal: Google Upgrades its Search Algorithm with Multimodal AI
Google will upgrade its search engine with a new model that tracks the relationships between words, images, and, in time, videos — the first fruit of its latest research into multimodal machine learning and multilingual language modeling.
Tech & Society
The Social Nightmare: Facebook Whistleblower Exposes How Company Harms Users
Scrutiny of Facebook intensified after a whistleblower leaked internal research showing the company has known that its ongoing drive to engage users has harmed individuals and society at large.
Tech & Society
Rules for Recommenders: China Bans Harmful Recommendation Algorithms
China moved toward a clamp down on recommendation algorithms.What’s new: China’s internet regulatory agency proposed rules that include banning algorithms that spread disinformation and threaten national security.
Tech & Society
Bespoke Models on a Grand Scale: How FreshWorks uses AI to build products for sales teams.
When every email, text, or call a company receives could mean a sale, reps need to figure out who to reply to first. Machine learning can help, but using it at scale requires a highly automated operation.
Tech & Society
The Coming Crackdown: The 2021 draft version of the European Union's AI Act
The European Union proposed sweeping restrictions on AI technologies and applications. The executive arm of the 27-nation EU published draft rules that aim to regulate, and in some cases ban, a range of AI systems.
Machine Learning Research
Toward Better Video Search: An NLP system for improved video search
Researchers at the University of Bristol led by Michael Wray propose a new benchmark, Semantic Similarity Video Retrieval (SVR), that evaluates video retrieval systems by their ability to rank many similar videos. They also built a system that performed well on it.
Tech & Society
Social Engagement vs. Social Good: The builder of Facebook's algorithm talks bias.
Facebook’s management obstructed the architect of its recommendation algorithms from mitigating their negative social impact. The social network focused on reining in algorithmic bias against particular groups of users at the expense of efforts to reduce disinformation.