

Deep Learning: Facebook Wants To Know Even More About Its Users - dave_sullivan
http://allfacebook.com/deep-learning_b125358

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paulgb
This article adds nothing except sensationalism to the original article by MIT
Technology Review [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519411/facebook-
launche...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519411/facebook-launches-
advanced-ai-effort-to-find-meaning-in-your-posts/)

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raldu
"Facebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts"

Funny how the headline looks as if facebook couldn't find any meaning in user
posts, and they are now desperately turning to AI for help.

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lpolovets
The headline amuses me. Of course they want to know even more about their
users! What data-driven company wouldn't? This is like saying "Apple wants to
make even more money" or "GM wants to sell even more cars."

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code_duck
I presumed this is going to be about Facebook's constant push for users to
fill out more "profile information ". Every time I go to my profile, I am
presented with a banner about updating my info… They ask for more school
details, or lately, books, music and movies that I'm familiar with. One day I
filled out something about movies at their request, then I saw on my
girlfriends newsfeed and I've been saying that I added movies to the list of
movies I'd watched! Which I suppose I had but it seemed somewhat disingenuous
since it was at their urging.

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magicalist
Yeah, it's the same on LinkedIn and Google+ lately (on LinkedIn you get it
reduced to those extra ridiculous endorsements...just a binary "do you think
person X is skilled at _typing using a keyboard_?"). They've learned that if
you ask single questions people actually answer them, while many people find
an entire empty profile daunting and so don't get far (or never even start).

Completely off topic, but the Facebook movie thing is weird. They no longer
ask for your favorite movies in your profile, which at least somewhat lines up
with a "profile" of a person, as your favorites say something about you (true
or not). Now your profile just asks for "movies you've watched", which is
bizarre. Most people have seen a lot of movies; what helpful information does
that communicate to Facebook or to your Facebook friends, which is supposed to
be the point? Certainly it's unlikely that you'll be able to fill that out
comprehensively, or with a sampling good enough that some ML algorithm can
make something of it. I guess it is self selected, which says something about
what movies you've seen, can recall, and are willing to disclose, but it still
seems to be setting about the lowest bar possible. Is it going to ask for
"sports you've watched" next? "Celebrities you've heard of"?

Edit: maybe it's just another user psychology thing. "Favorite movies" might
make people worry too much about what to put, while "movies you've watched" is
_meant_ to be a super low bar, and people will still tend to put their
favorite movies in anyway? Those people who love updating their profiles will
dilute that signal by adding every new movie they see going forward, but
that's just a different, still useful signal.

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code_duck
Part of why I felt it out is that it was presented to me as very low-key
thing, just finishing profile information… "Movies I've watched", which as you
said is very casual. But then it was presented to others like information that
I (I'm grandfathered into a grooveshark subscription at $3 a mo. and have kept
it despite the fact that a I have a spotify subscription...)specifically felt
the need to go add to my profile on my own, as if it was important that I
watched some obscure movie from 1982 and really wanted my friends to know.
It's even sillier that they were movies from a random FB list of 3 choices for
each question, not something I typed in.

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sjtgraham
I think this would be fascinating to work on, the size and variety of FB's
data is mind boggling. If I was looking for a job and had more ML experience
(it's only been a focus of mine for the past year or so) then I would be
finding out how to get on that team.

Any interesting ideas I have involve a heavy machine learning component. I'm
sure the most valuable software companies in the future will have too.

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route66
You might try NSA, they have possibly even more data to boggle ones mind. You
find that fascinating because of the _means_ or of the _ends_ of it?

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sjtgraham
Ha, unfortunately:

\- I'm not American

\- I'd rather make stuff that improves people's lives in any way, and not
subvert their freedoms.

ML is fascinating to me because what can be done with it.

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thedrbrian
Better not join Facebook then

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nwenzel
Google hires Prof Hinton. Facebook counters. There was a subtle point in the
article referencing the fact that this challenge has both a software and
hardware component. Add in complexities of parallel processing and running on
GPUs and you have a pretty limited talent poop to pick from.

Glad to see the interest in deep learning even if it is sensationalizing it a
bit. More interest and a bigger community will be helpful for startups like
us.

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turing
An interesting thing to note: Facebook actually hired Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
away from Google, where he was working on the Brain project. Prior to that he
was working in Hinton's lab at University of Toronto.

[http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ranzato/](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ranzato/)

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xaviel
Facebook Recruits on Kaggle, a Machine Learning competition site:
[http://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-recruiting-iii-keyword-
extr...](http://www.kaggle.com/c/facebook-recruiting-iii-keyword-extraction)

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tensor
I love it. "Do some free work for us and maybe we'll hire you!"

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tarblog
It's not for them though. It's just data science competitions that anyone can
enter.

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thesmileyone
Yet more money to be made selling our thoughts then.

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sjtgraham
Don't sell your thoughts to Facebook then. Very simple.

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jlgaddis
> sell

Worse, people freely give them away.

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ape4
To help users or advertisers?

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coldcode
Why even ask...

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runn1ng
I would bet both.

Facebook without users don't have anyone to advertise to. But obviously they
want to be efficient to advertisers, too...

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b0b0b0b
I'm curious what kind of data they want to analyze with deep learning.

