Facebook is set to get an even better understanding of the 700 million people who share details of their personal lives using the social network each day.
A new research group within the company is working on an emerging and powerful approach to artificial intelligence known as deep learning, which uses simulated networks of brain cells to process data. Applying this method to data shared on Facebook could allow for novel features, and perhaps boost the company’s ad targeting.
Deep learning has shown potential to enable software to do things such as work out the emotions or events described in text even if they aren’t explicitly referenced, recognize objects in photos, and make sophisticated predictions about people’s likely future behavior.
The eight-strong group, known internally as the AI team, only recently started work, and details of its experiments are still secret. But Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, will say that one obvious place to use deep learning is to improve the news feed, the personalized list of recent updates he calls Facebook’s “killer app.” The company already uses conventional machine learning techniques to prune the 1,500 updates that average Facebook users could possibly see down to 30 to 60 that are judged to be most likely to be important to them. Schroepfer says Facebook needs to get better at picking the best updates due to the growing volume of data its users generate and changes in how people use the social network.
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