Tag: Machine Learning
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Ghost in the Machine
There are at least two sides to every story. The Planned Parenthood videos were a polarizing topic that monopolized the news cycle several weeks ago. How do you teach an algorithm a point of view? How do you optimize for discovery and strike the right balance for diversity while avoiding duplication? SmartNews is a news aggregation app driven…
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Spotify’s Mixtape Algorithm
With the launch of Apple Music’s “For You” feature, Spotify hand has been forced to unveil it’s own personalization engine in response. Discover Weekly was launched today via a series of well-timed pieces published today across the tech press. The PR push is on to explain to everyone currently evaluating Apple Music on a 3-month trial. Spotify…
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The importance of context
Surprisingly, the YouTube recommendation algorithm doesn’t draw inputs from far beyond the confines of YouTube itself. You might think that mining our Google search histories for clues about what videos we’d like would pay off. Nope, Goodrow says. “The challenge is that web search history is very very broad.” Just because you Googled for help…
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Popping filter bubbles at SmartNews
It’s now just over a month since I joined SmartNews and I am digging into what’s under the hood and the mad science that drives the deceptively simple interface of the SmartNews product. On the surface, SmartNews is a news aggregator. Our server pulls in urls from a variety of feeds and custom crawls but the…