Could Google passage indexing be leveraging BERT? [Dawn Anderson @SearchEngineLand]
Google’s language model BERT has (and still is) created some attention in the NLP and Search community when it was released in 2018, and incorporated...
Against All Odds: Netflix, From Mail-Order DVD Rentals to Streaming Dominance [Shawn Knight @ TechSpot]
Shown Knight from Techspot writes about the history of Netflix and how Netflix evolved from a mail-order DVD rental to the world’s largest streaming service....
Apple introduces Fitness+, a “new engaging and personalized fitness experience”
Apple announced Fitness+, a new app that is supposed to enable personalized fitness workouts and hence competes with Peloton. According to Apple’s press release: Apple...
TechCrunch publishes an excerpt from ‘Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance’
Matthew Brennan and Rita Liao from TechCrunch publish an excerpt from the book Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance. Given that the...
Ocilion and Xroad Media launch a recsys for TV shows
ocilion – provider of IPTV solutions – and Xroad Media – provider of ‘content discovery solutions’ – partner up. They integrate Xroad Media’s recommender system...
What Twitter learned from the Recsys 2020 Challenge [Michael Bronstein et al.]
‘What Twitter learned from the Recsys 2020 Challenge’ is a blog post authored by Michael Bronstein, Luca Belli, Apoorv Sharma, Yuanpu Xie, Ying Xiao, Dan...
Spotify considers the interests of artists when recommending music to users
Spotify announced a new feature that allows artists and music labels to influence how their music is recommended to the users of Spotify. In this...
Facebook Quietly Suspended Political Group Recommendations Ahead Of The US Presidential Election [BuzzFeed]
A few days before the US election, Facebook deactivated its recommender system for political content, according to BuzzFeed (Ryan Mac & Craig Silverman). Interestingly, this...
Big tech’s ‘blackbox’ [recommendation] algorithms face regulatory oversight under EU plans [Natasha Lomas @ TechCrunch]
The EU plans to require large tech firms to disclose how their algorithms work, including recommendations algorithms, reports Natasha Lomas from TechCrunch. In a speech today Commission...
“Recommendation Engines”, a new book on recommender systems by Michael Schrage
There is a new textbook on recommender systems, titled simply “Recommendation Engines“. The author is Michael Schrage. He has a business background and, to the...