For many years, the main goal of the Netflix personalized recommendation system has been to get the right titles in front of our members at the right time. But the job of recommendation does not end there. The homepage should be able to convey to the member enough evidence of why a title may be good for her, especially for shows that the member has never heard of. One way to address this challenge is to personalize the way we portray the titles on our service. An important aspect of how to portray titles is through the artwork or imagery we display to visually represent each title. The artwork may highlight an actor that you recognize, capture an exciting moment like a car chase, or contain a dramatic scene that conveys the essence of a movie or show. It is important to select good artwork because it may be the first time a member becomes aware of a title (and sometimes the only time), so it must speak to them in a meaningful way. In this talk, we will present an approach for personalizing the artwork we use on the Netflix homepage. The system selects an image for each member and video to give better visual evidence for why the title might be appealing to that particular member.
Personalizing "The Netflix Experience" with Deep LearningAnoop Deoras
These are the slides from my talk presented at AI Next Con conference in Seattle in Jan 2019. Here I talk in a bit more detail about the intuition behind collaborative filtering and go a bit deeper into the details of non linear deep learned models.
Talk from QCon SF on 2018-11-05
For many years, the main goal of the Netflix personalized recommendation system has been to get the right titles in front each of our members at the right time. With a catalog spanning thousands of titles and a diverse member base spanning over a hundred million accounts, recommending the titles that are just right for each member is crucial. But the job of recommendation does not end there. Why should you care about any particular title we recommend? What can we say about a new and unfamiliar title that will pique your interest? How do we convince you that a title is worth watching? Answering these questions is critical in helping our members discover great content, especially for unfamiliar titles. One way to do this is to consider the artwork or imagery we use to visually portray each title. If the artwork representing a title captures something compelling to you, then it acts as a gateway into that title and gives you some visual “evidence” for why the title might be good for you. Selecting good artwork is important because it may be the first time a member becomes aware of a title (and sometimes the only time), so it must speak to them in a meaningful way. In this talk, we will present an approach for personalizing the artwork we show for each title on the Netflix homepage. We will look at how to frame this as a machine learning problem using contextual multi-armed bandits in a recommendation system setting. We will also describe the algorithmic and system challenges involved in getting this type of approach for artwork personalization to succeed at Netflix scale. Finally, we will discuss some of the future opportunities that we see to expand and improve upon this approach.
At Netflix we take context of the member seriously.
In this keynote talk we will see how modeling contextual factors such as time or device can help members to find the right content at the right moment
At the end, the goal is to maximize member satisfaction and retention
These slides will go through which contextual factors matters for the video service and why we choose to use them or not.
Déjà Vu: The Importance of Time and Causality in Recommender SystemsJustin Basilico
Talk at RecSys 2017 in Como, Italy on 2017-08-29.
Abstract:
Time plays a key role in recommendation. Handling it properly is especially critical when using recommender systems in real-world applications, which may not be as clear when doing research with historical data. In this talk, we will discuss some of the important challenges of handling time in recommendation algorithms at Netflix. We will focus on challenges related to how our users, items, and systems all change over time. We will then discuss some strategies for tackling these challenges, which revolves around proper treatment of causality in our systems.
Past, Present & Future of Recommender Systems: An Industry PerspectiveJustin Basilico
Slides from our talk at the RecSys 2016 conference in Boston, MA 2016-09-18 on our perspective for what are important areas for future work in recommender systems.
Personalizing "The Netflix Experience" with Deep LearningAnoop Deoras
These are the slides from my talk presented at AI Next Con conference in Seattle in Jan 2019. Here I talk in a bit more detail about the intuition behind collaborative filtering and go a bit deeper into the details of non linear deep learned models.
Talk from QCon SF on 2018-11-05
For many years, the main goal of the Netflix personalized recommendation system has been to get the right titles in front each of our members at the right time. With a catalog spanning thousands of titles and a diverse member base spanning over a hundred million accounts, recommending the titles that are just right for each member is crucial. But the job of recommendation does not end there. Why should you care about any particular title we recommend? What can we say about a new and unfamiliar title that will pique your interest? How do we convince you that a title is worth watching? Answering these questions is critical in helping our members discover great content, especially for unfamiliar titles. One way to do this is to consider the artwork or imagery we use to visually portray each title. If the artwork representing a title captures something compelling to you, then it acts as a gateway into that title and gives you some visual “evidence” for why the title might be good for you. Selecting good artwork is important because it may be the first time a member becomes aware of a title (and sometimes the only time), so it must speak to them in a meaningful way. In this talk, we will present an approach for personalizing the artwork we show for each title on the Netflix homepage. We will look at how to frame this as a machine learning problem using contextual multi-armed bandits in a recommendation system setting. We will also describe the algorithmic and system challenges involved in getting this type of approach for artwork personalization to succeed at Netflix scale. Finally, we will discuss some of the future opportunities that we see to expand and improve upon this approach.
At Netflix we take context of the member seriously.
In this keynote talk we will see how modeling contextual factors such as time or device can help members to find the right content at the right moment
At the end, the goal is to maximize member satisfaction and retention
These slides will go through which contextual factors matters for the video service and why we choose to use them or not.
Déjà Vu: The Importance of Time and Causality in Recommender SystemsJustin Basilico
Talk at RecSys 2017 in Como, Italy on 2017-08-29.
Abstract:
Time plays a key role in recommendation. Handling it properly is especially critical when using recommender systems in real-world applications, which may not be as clear when doing research with historical data. In this talk, we will discuss some of the important challenges of handling time in recommendation algorithms at Netflix. We will focus on challenges related to how our users, items, and systems all change over time. We will then discuss some strategies for tackling these challenges, which revolves around proper treatment of causality in our systems.
Past, Present & Future of Recommender Systems: An Industry PerspectiveJustin Basilico
Slides from our talk at the RecSys 2016 conference in Boston, MA 2016-09-18 on our perspective for what are important areas for future work in recommender systems.
Crafting Recommenders: the Shallow and the Deep of it! Sudeep Das, Ph.D.
I present a brief review, and an outlook on the rapid changes happening in the field of recommendation engine research on the heels of the deep learning revolution!
Tutorial on Deep Learning in Recommender System, Lars summer school 2019Anoop Deoras
I had a fun time giving tutorial on the topic of deep learning in recommender systems at Latin America School on Recommender Systems (LARS) in Fortaleza, Brazil.
Deeper Things: How Netflix Leverages Deep Learning in Recommendations and Se...Sudeep Das, Ph.D.
In this talk, we will provide an overview of Deep Learning methods applied to personalization and search at Netflix. We will set the stage by describing the unique challenges faced at Netflix in the areas of recommendations and information retrieval. Then we will delve into how we leverage a blend of traditional algorithms and emergent deep learning methods and new types of embeddings, especially hyperbolic space embeddings, to address these challenges.
(Presented at the Deep Learning Re-Work SF Summit on 01/25/2018)
In this talk, we go through the traditional recommendation systems set-up, and show that deep learning approaches in that set-up don't bring a lot of extra value. We then focus on different ways to leverage these techniques, most of which relying on breaking away from that traditional set-up; through providing additional data to your recommendation algorithm, modeling different facets of user/item interactions, and most importantly re-framing the recommendation problem itself. In particular we show a few results obtained by casting the problem as a contextual sequence prediction task, and using it to model time (a very important dimension in most recommendation systems).
A Multi-Armed Bandit Framework For Recommendations at NetflixJaya Kawale
In this talk, we present a general multi-armed bandit framework for recommendations on the Netflix homepage. We present two example case studies using MABs at Netflix - a) Artwork Personalization to recommend personalized visuals for each of our members for the different titles and b) Billboard recommendation to recommend the right title to be watched on the Billboard.
RecSys 2020 A Human Perspective on Algorithmic Similarity Schendel 9-2020Zachary Schendel
In the Netflix user interface (UI), when a row or UI element is named “Because you Watched...”, “More Like This”, or “Because you added to your list”, the overarching goal is to recommend a movie or TV show that a member might like based on the fact that they took a meaningful action on a source item. We have employed similar recommendations in many UI elements: on the homepage as a row of recommendations, after you click into a title, or as a piece of information about why a member should watch a title.
From an algorithmic perspective, there are many ways to define a “successful” similar recommendation. We sought to broaden that definition of success. To this end, the Consumer Insights team recently completed a suite of research projects to explore the intricacies of member perceptions of similar recommendations. The Netflix Consumer Insights team employs qualitative (e.g., in-depth interviews) and quantitative (e.g., surveys) research methods, interfacing directly with Netflix members to uncover pain points that can inspire new product innovation. The research concluded that, while the typical member believes movies are broadly similar when they share a common genre or theme, similarity is more complex, nuanced, and personal than we might have imagined. The vernacular we use in the UI implies that there should be at least some kind of relationship between the source item and the recommendations that follow. Many of our similar recommendations felt “out of place”, mostly because the relationship between the source item and the recommendation was unclear or absent. When similar recommendations tell a completely misleading, incorrect, or confusing story, member trust can be broken.
We will structure the presentation around three new insights that our research found to have an influence on the perception of similarity in the context of Netflix as well as the research methods used to uncover those insights. First, the reason a member loves a given movie will vary. For example, do you want to watch other baseball movies like Field of Dreams, or would you prefer other romances like Field of Dreams? Second, members are more or less flexible about how similar a recommendation actually needs to be depending on the properties of and their interactions with the canvas containing the recommendation. For example, a Because You Watched row on the homepage implies vaguer similarity while a More Like This gallery behind a click into the source item implies stricter similarity. Finally, even when we held the UI element constant, we found that similar recommendations are only valuable in some contexts. After finishing a movie, a member might prefer a similar recommendation one day and a change of pace the next. Research methods discussed will include Inverse Multi-Dimensional Scaling [1], survey experimentation, and ways to apply qualitative research to improve algorithmic recommendations.
At Netflix, we try to provide the best personalized video recommendations to our members. To do this, we need to adapt our recommendations for each contextual situation, which depends on information such as time or device. In this talk, I will describe how state of the art Contextual Recommendations are used at Netflix. A first example of contextual adaptation is the model that powers the Continue Watching row. It uses a feature-based approach with a carefully constructed training set to learn how to adapt to the context of the member. Next, I will dive into more modern approaches such as Tensor Factorization and LSTMs and share some results from deployments of these methods. I will highlight lessons learned and some common pitfalls of using these powerful methods in industrial scale systems. Finally, I will touch upon system reliability, choice of optimization metrics, hidden costs, risks and benefits of using highly adaptive systems.
Talk with Yves Raimond at the GPU Tech Conference on Marth 28, 2018 in San Jose, CA.
Abstract:
In this talk, we will survey how Deep Learning methods can be applied to personalization and recommendations. We will cover why standard Deep Learning approaches don't perform better than typical collaborative filtering techniques. Then we will survey we will go over recently published research at the intersection of Deep Learning and recommender systems, looking at how they integrate new types of data, explore new models, or change the recommendation problem statement. We will also highlight some of the ways that neural networks are used at Netflix and how we can use GPUs to train recommender systems. Finally, we will highlight promising new directions in this space.
Shallow and Deep Latent Models for Recommender SystemAnoop Deoras
In this presentation, we survey latent models, starting with shallow and progressing towards deep, as applied to personalization and recommendations. After providing an overview of the Netflix recommender system, we discuss research at the intersection of deep learning, natural language processing and recommender systems and how they relate to traditional collaborative filtering techniques. We will present case studies in the space of deep latent variable models applied to recommender systems.
Presentation at the Netflix Expo session at RecSys 2020 virtual conference on 2020-09-24. It provides an overview of recommendation and personalization at Netflix and then highlights some of the things we’ve been working on as well as some important open research questions in the field of recommendations.
Personalization at Netflix - Making Stories Travel Sudeep Das, Ph.D.
I give a high level overview of how personalization at Netflix helps our members find titles that spark joy, as well as help stories travel across the world.
The Netflix experience is driven by a number of Machine Learning algorithms: personalized ranking, page generation, search, similarity, ratings, etc. On the 6th of January, we simultaneously launched Netflix in 130 new countries around the world, which brings the total to over 190 countries. Preparing for such a rapid expansion while ensuring each algorithm was ready to work seamlessly created new challenges for our recommendation and search teams. In this post, we highlight the four most interesting challenges we’ve encountered in making our algorithms operate globally and, most importantly, how this improved our ability to connect members worldwide with stories they'll love.
Interactive Recommender Systems with Netflix and SpotifyChris Johnson
Interactive recommender systems enable the user to steer the received recommendations in the desired direction through explicit interaction with the system. In the larger ecosystem of recommender systems used on a website, it is positioned between a lean-back recommendation experience and an active search for a specific piece of content. Besides this aspect, we will discuss several parts that are especially important for interactive recommender systems, including the following: design of the user interface and its tight integration with the algorithm in the back-end; computational efficiency of the recommender algorithm; as well as choosing the right balance between exploiting the feedback from the user as to provide relevant recommendations, and enabling the user to explore the catalog and steer the recommendations in the desired direction.
In particular, we will explore the field of interactive video and music recommendations and their application at Netflix and Spotify. We outline some of the user-experiences built, and discuss the approaches followed to tackle the various aspects of interactive recommendations. We present our insights from user studies and A/B tests.
The tutorial targets researchers and practitioners in the field of recommender systems, and will give the participants a unique opportunity to learn about the various aspects of interactive recommender systems in the video and music domain. The tutorial assumes familiarity with the common methods of recommender systems.
Recommendation systems today are widely used across many applications such as in multimedia content platforms, social networks, and ecommerce, to provide suggestions to users that are most likely to fulfill their needs, thereby improving the user experience. Academic research, to date, largely focuses on the performance of recommendation models in terms of ranking quality or accuracy measures, which often don’t directly translate into improvements in the real-world. In this talk, we present some of the most interesting challenges that we face in the personalization efforts at Netflix. The goal of this talk is to sunshine challenging research problems in industrial recommendation systems and start a conversation about exciting areas of future research.
Crafting Recommenders: the Shallow and the Deep of it! Sudeep Das, Ph.D.
I present a brief review, and an outlook on the rapid changes happening in the field of recommendation engine research on the heels of the deep learning revolution!
Tutorial on Deep Learning in Recommender System, Lars summer school 2019Anoop Deoras
I had a fun time giving tutorial on the topic of deep learning in recommender systems at Latin America School on Recommender Systems (LARS) in Fortaleza, Brazil.
Deeper Things: How Netflix Leverages Deep Learning in Recommendations and Se...Sudeep Das, Ph.D.
In this talk, we will provide an overview of Deep Learning methods applied to personalization and search at Netflix. We will set the stage by describing the unique challenges faced at Netflix in the areas of recommendations and information retrieval. Then we will delve into how we leverage a blend of traditional algorithms and emergent deep learning methods and new types of embeddings, especially hyperbolic space embeddings, to address these challenges.
(Presented at the Deep Learning Re-Work SF Summit on 01/25/2018)
In this talk, we go through the traditional recommendation systems set-up, and show that deep learning approaches in that set-up don't bring a lot of extra value. We then focus on different ways to leverage these techniques, most of which relying on breaking away from that traditional set-up; through providing additional data to your recommendation algorithm, modeling different facets of user/item interactions, and most importantly re-framing the recommendation problem itself. In particular we show a few results obtained by casting the problem as a contextual sequence prediction task, and using it to model time (a very important dimension in most recommendation systems).
A Multi-Armed Bandit Framework For Recommendations at NetflixJaya Kawale
In this talk, we present a general multi-armed bandit framework for recommendations on the Netflix homepage. We present two example case studies using MABs at Netflix - a) Artwork Personalization to recommend personalized visuals for each of our members for the different titles and b) Billboard recommendation to recommend the right title to be watched on the Billboard.
RecSys 2020 A Human Perspective on Algorithmic Similarity Schendel 9-2020Zachary Schendel
In the Netflix user interface (UI), when a row or UI element is named “Because you Watched...”, “More Like This”, or “Because you added to your list”, the overarching goal is to recommend a movie or TV show that a member might like based on the fact that they took a meaningful action on a source item. We have employed similar recommendations in many UI elements: on the homepage as a row of recommendations, after you click into a title, or as a piece of information about why a member should watch a title.
From an algorithmic perspective, there are many ways to define a “successful” similar recommendation. We sought to broaden that definition of success. To this end, the Consumer Insights team recently completed a suite of research projects to explore the intricacies of member perceptions of similar recommendations. The Netflix Consumer Insights team employs qualitative (e.g., in-depth interviews) and quantitative (e.g., surveys) research methods, interfacing directly with Netflix members to uncover pain points that can inspire new product innovation. The research concluded that, while the typical member believes movies are broadly similar when they share a common genre or theme, similarity is more complex, nuanced, and personal than we might have imagined. The vernacular we use in the UI implies that there should be at least some kind of relationship between the source item and the recommendations that follow. Many of our similar recommendations felt “out of place”, mostly because the relationship between the source item and the recommendation was unclear or absent. When similar recommendations tell a completely misleading, incorrect, or confusing story, member trust can be broken.
We will structure the presentation around three new insights that our research found to have an influence on the perception of similarity in the context of Netflix as well as the research methods used to uncover those insights. First, the reason a member loves a given movie will vary. For example, do you want to watch other baseball movies like Field of Dreams, or would you prefer other romances like Field of Dreams? Second, members are more or less flexible about how similar a recommendation actually needs to be depending on the properties of and their interactions with the canvas containing the recommendation. For example, a Because You Watched row on the homepage implies vaguer similarity while a More Like This gallery behind a click into the source item implies stricter similarity. Finally, even when we held the UI element constant, we found that similar recommendations are only valuable in some contexts. After finishing a movie, a member might prefer a similar recommendation one day and a change of pace the next. Research methods discussed will include Inverse Multi-Dimensional Scaling [1], survey experimentation, and ways to apply qualitative research to improve algorithmic recommendations.
At Netflix, we try to provide the best personalized video recommendations to our members. To do this, we need to adapt our recommendations for each contextual situation, which depends on information such as time or device. In this talk, I will describe how state of the art Contextual Recommendations are used at Netflix. A first example of contextual adaptation is the model that powers the Continue Watching row. It uses a feature-based approach with a carefully constructed training set to learn how to adapt to the context of the member. Next, I will dive into more modern approaches such as Tensor Factorization and LSTMs and share some results from deployments of these methods. I will highlight lessons learned and some common pitfalls of using these powerful methods in industrial scale systems. Finally, I will touch upon system reliability, choice of optimization metrics, hidden costs, risks and benefits of using highly adaptive systems.
Talk with Yves Raimond at the GPU Tech Conference on Marth 28, 2018 in San Jose, CA.
Abstract:
In this talk, we will survey how Deep Learning methods can be applied to personalization and recommendations. We will cover why standard Deep Learning approaches don't perform better than typical collaborative filtering techniques. Then we will survey we will go over recently published research at the intersection of Deep Learning and recommender systems, looking at how they integrate new types of data, explore new models, or change the recommendation problem statement. We will also highlight some of the ways that neural networks are used at Netflix and how we can use GPUs to train recommender systems. Finally, we will highlight promising new directions in this space.
Shallow and Deep Latent Models for Recommender SystemAnoop Deoras
In this presentation, we survey latent models, starting with shallow and progressing towards deep, as applied to personalization and recommendations. After providing an overview of the Netflix recommender system, we discuss research at the intersection of deep learning, natural language processing and recommender systems and how they relate to traditional collaborative filtering techniques. We will present case studies in the space of deep latent variable models applied to recommender systems.
Presentation at the Netflix Expo session at RecSys 2020 virtual conference on 2020-09-24. It provides an overview of recommendation and personalization at Netflix and then highlights some of the things we’ve been working on as well as some important open research questions in the field of recommendations.
Personalization at Netflix - Making Stories Travel Sudeep Das, Ph.D.
I give a high level overview of how personalization at Netflix helps our members find titles that spark joy, as well as help stories travel across the world.
The Netflix experience is driven by a number of Machine Learning algorithms: personalized ranking, page generation, search, similarity, ratings, etc. On the 6th of January, we simultaneously launched Netflix in 130 new countries around the world, which brings the total to over 190 countries. Preparing for such a rapid expansion while ensuring each algorithm was ready to work seamlessly created new challenges for our recommendation and search teams. In this post, we highlight the four most interesting challenges we’ve encountered in making our algorithms operate globally and, most importantly, how this improved our ability to connect members worldwide with stories they'll love.
Interactive Recommender Systems with Netflix and SpotifyChris Johnson
Interactive recommender systems enable the user to steer the received recommendations in the desired direction through explicit interaction with the system. In the larger ecosystem of recommender systems used on a website, it is positioned between a lean-back recommendation experience and an active search for a specific piece of content. Besides this aspect, we will discuss several parts that are especially important for interactive recommender systems, including the following: design of the user interface and its tight integration with the algorithm in the back-end; computational efficiency of the recommender algorithm; as well as choosing the right balance between exploiting the feedback from the user as to provide relevant recommendations, and enabling the user to explore the catalog and steer the recommendations in the desired direction.
In particular, we will explore the field of interactive video and music recommendations and their application at Netflix and Spotify. We outline some of the user-experiences built, and discuss the approaches followed to tackle the various aspects of interactive recommendations. We present our insights from user studies and A/B tests.
The tutorial targets researchers and practitioners in the field of recommender systems, and will give the participants a unique opportunity to learn about the various aspects of interactive recommender systems in the video and music domain. The tutorial assumes familiarity with the common methods of recommender systems.
Recommendation systems today are widely used across many applications such as in multimedia content platforms, social networks, and ecommerce, to provide suggestions to users that are most likely to fulfill their needs, thereby improving the user experience. Academic research, to date, largely focuses on the performance of recommendation models in terms of ranking quality or accuracy measures, which often don’t directly translate into improvements in the real-world. In this talk, we present some of the most interesting challenges that we face in the personalization efforts at Netflix. The goal of this talk is to sunshine challenging research problems in industrial recommendation systems and start a conversation about exciting areas of future research.
Netflix talk at ML Platform meetup Sep 2019Faisal Siddiqi
In this talk at the Netflix Machine Learning Platform Meetup on 12 Sep 2019, Fernando Amat and Elliot Chow from Netflix talk about the Bandit infrastructure for Personalized Recommendations
Churn Prediction in Mobile Social Games: Towards a Complete Assessment Using ...Silicon Studio Corporation
Reducing user attrition, i.e. churn, is a broad challenge faced by several industries. In mobile social games, decreasing churn is decisive to increase player retention and rise revenues. Churn prediction models allow to understand player loyalty and to anticipate when they will stop playing a game. Thanks to these predictions, several initiatives can be taken to retain those players who are more likely to churn. Survival analysis focuses on predicting the time of occurrence of a certain event, churn in our case. Classical methods, like regressions, could be applied only when all players have left the game. The challenge arises for datasets with incomplete churning information for all players, as most of them still connect to the game. This is called a censored data problem and is in the nature of churn. Censoring is commonly dealt with survival analysis techniques, but due to the inflexibility of the survival statistical algorithms, the accuracy achieved is often poor. In contrast, novel ensemble learning techniques, increasingly popular in a variety of scientific fields, provide high-class prediction results. In this work, we develop, for the first time in the social games domain, a survival ensemble model which provides a comprehensive analysis together with an accurate prediction of churn. For each player, we predict the probability of churning as function of time, which permits to distinguish various levels of loyalty profiles. Additionally, we assess the risk factors that explain the predicted player survival times. Our results show that churn prediction by survival ensembles significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of traditional analyses, like Cox regression.
Andrea Ceroni: Personal Photo Management and PreservationPhotoPrism.org
PhotoPrism is a server-based application for browsing, organizing and sharing your personal photo collection. It makes use of the latest technologies to automatically tag and find pictures without getting in your way.
Our long-term goal is to become an open platform for machine learning research based on real-world photo collections.
Please reach out to us if you work for an organization that can support our project as we are looking for a way to continue doing this full-time. We'll be happy to mention your contribution. Sponsors also get direct access to our team of top-class engineers and scientists.
Adam Kramarzewski is a Game Designer at Space Ape with 11 years of experience in the industry and a new book just about to be published. He gives students an unfiltered insight into the production practices, responsibilities, and challenges facing Game Designers in the modern game development scene.
Recommender Systems represent one of the most widespread and impactful applications of predictive machine learning models.
Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Facebook and many other companies generate an important fraction of their revenues thanks to their ability to model and accurately predict users ratings and preferences.
In this presentation we cover the following points:
→ introduction to recommender systems
→ working with explicit vs implicit feedback
→ content-based vs collaborative filtering approaches
→ user-based and item-item methods
→ machine learning and deep learning models
→ pros & cons of the methods: scalability, accuracy, explainability
GLAID: Designing a Game Learning Analytics Model to Analyze the Learning Process in Users with Cognitive Disabilities
Downtown: Serious Game designed and develop to teach young people with Down Syndrome to move around the city using the subway
We are using learnig analytics for evaluating the game and for knowing how the user is doing in the game
This work is part of the H2020 BEACONING project
Downtown is a game
Artificial Intelligence Workshop, Collegio universitario Bertoni, Milano, 20 May 2017.
Audience of the workshop: undergraduate students without neural networks background.
Summary:
- Deep Learning Showcase
- What is deep learning and how it works
- How to start with deep learning
- Live demo: image recognition with Nvidia DIGITS
- Playground
Duration: 2 hours.
Xavier Amatriain, VP of Engineering, Quora at MLconf SF - 11/13/15MLconf
10 More Lessons Learned from Building Real-Life ML Systems: A year ago I presented a collection of 10 lessons in MLConf. These goal of the presentation was to highlight some of the practical issues that ML practitioners encounter in the field, many of which are not included in traditional textbooks and courses. The original 10 lessons included some related to issues such as feature complexity, sampling, regularization, distributing/parallelizing algorithms, or how to think about offline vs. online computation.
Since that presentation and associated material was published, I have been asked to complement it with more/newer material. In this talk I will present 10 new lessons that not only build upon the original ones, but also relate to my recent experiences at Quora. I will talk about the importance of metrics, training data, and debuggability of ML systems. I will also describe how to combine supervised and non-supervised approaches or the role of ensembles in practical ML systems.
Past, present, and future of Recommender Systems: an industry perspectiveXavier Amatriain
Keynote for the ACM Intelligent User Interface conference in 2016 in Sonoma, CA. I start with the past by talking about the Recommender Problem, and the Netflix Prize. Then I go into the Present and the Future by talking about approaches that go beyond rating prediction and ranking and by finishing with some of the most important lessons learned over the years. Throughout my talk I put special emphasis on the relation between algorithms and the User Interface.
Those Days is designed for the everyday traveler and blogger, who is always on the move. With an automated log of daily activities generated onto the phone, the user never has to manual input a single thing. Users will be able to go along their day without having to interact with the application until they want to. This way, we believe, will provide the user with the optimal experience. Those Days provides the automation that current products on the market today can not. Users can view the current day or their previous days by selecting a day in the
calendar and proceed to browse through the activities of the selected day. They can select and view individual activities and their corresponding metadata, for example, a picture taken during the time of an activity. If desired, the user can input additional comments to the activity or even tweet it out.
Similar to Artwork Personalization at Netflix Fernando Amat RecSys2018 (20)
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
"Impact of front-end architecture on development cost", Viktor TurskyiFwdays
I have heard many times that architecture is not important for the front-end. Also, many times I have seen how developers implement features on the front-end just following the standard rules for a framework and think that this is enough to successfully launch the project, and then the project fails. How to prevent this and what approach to choose? I have launched dozens of complex projects and during the talk we will analyze which approaches have worked for me and which have not.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
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During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
7. Intuition for Personalized Assets
● Emphasize themes through different artwork according to some
context (user, viewing history, country, etc.)
Preferences in genre
8. Intuition for Personalized Assets
● Emphasize themes through different artwork according to some
context (user, viewing history, country, etc)
Preferences in cast members
9. Bandit Algorithms Setting
For each (user, show) request:
● Actions: set of candidate images available
● Reward: how many minutes did the user play from that impression
● Environment: Netflix homepage in user’s device
● Learner: its goal is to maximize the cumulative reward after N requests
Learner Environment
Action
Reward
Context
10. Numerous Variants
● Different Strategies: ε-Greedy, Thompson Sampling (TS), Upper Confidence
Bound (UCB), etc.
● Different Environments:
○ Stochastic and stationary: Reward is generated i.i.d. from a distribution
specific to the action. No payoff drift.
○ Adversarial: No assumptions on how rewards are generated.
● Different objectives: Cumulative regret, tracking the best expert
● Continuous or discrete set of actions, finite vs infinite
● Extensions: Varying set of arms, Contextual Bandits, etc.
11. Specific challenges
● Play attribution and reward assignment
○ Incremental effect of the image on top of recommender system
● Only one image per title can be presented
○ Although inherently it is a ranking problem
Would you play because the movie is recommended or because of the artwork? Or both?
12. Specific challenges
● Change effect
○ Can changing images too often make users confused?
Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 ... Session N
Sequence A
Sequence B
13. ● We have control over the set of actions
○ How many images per show
○ Image design
● What makes a good asset?
○ Representative (no clickbait)
○ Differential
○ Informative
○ Engaging
Actions
Personal (i.e. contextual)
15. ● Learn a binary classifier per image to predict probability of play
● Pick the winner (arg max)
Member
(context)
Features
Image Pool
Model 1
Winner
arg
max
Model 2
Model 3
Model 4
Greedy Policy Example
16. Take Fraction Example: Luke Cage
Take Fraction = 1 / 3
Play
No play
User A
User B
User C
17. ● Unbiased offline evaluation from explore data
Offline metric: Replay [Li et al, 2010]
Offline Take Fraction = 2 / 3
User 1 User 2 User 3 User 4 User 5 User 6
Random Assignment
Play?
Model Assignment
18. Offline Replay
● Context matters
● Artwork diversity matters
● Personalization wiggles
around most popular images
Lift in Replay in the various algorithms as
compared to the Random baseline
19. Online results
● Rollout to our >130M member base
● Most beneficial for lesser known titles
● Compression from title -level offline metrics due to cannibalization
between titles
21. Action selection orchestration
● Neighboring image selection influences result
● Title-level optimization is not enough
Row A
(diverse
images)
Row B
(the
microphone
row)
Stand-up comedy
22. Automatic image selection
● Generating new artwork is costly and time consuming
● Develop algorithm to predict asset quality from raw image
23. Long-term Reward: Road to RL
● Maximize long term reward: reinforcement learning
○ User long term joy rather than plays